This had a weird brief: National Crisis

In partnership with

Hello Creative Souls,

When prices rise, most brands stay quiet. The logic is simple: no one wants to sell when people can barely afford essentials. But Skip Express Lane — a grocery delivery app from Canada — did something quietly radical. It turned inflation itself into the story.

Their Inflation Cookbook campaign didn’t talk about deals, discounts, or delivery times. It showed people how to fight back. The tool scanned over 400 grocery items across Canada’s top supermarkets in real time, spotting price drops and spikes. Shoppers could enter their location, family size, and budget to generate the “smartest cart” of the week — a perfectly optimized grocery list that saved money without sacrificing nutrition.

Each cart came with healthy, AI-generated recipes designed by a chef and nutritionist. The visuals? Mouth-watering, Midjourney-made food shots that made budget meals look like they came from a restaurant. And yes, users could order directly through Skip or export their list to buy elsewhere. The point wasn’t just to convert users — it was to help them cope.

🍲 The Strategy Behind the Simplicity

The brilliance of the campaign lies in how it redefined brand utility. Instead of spending on awareness or emotion-driven storytelling, Skip offered something far more valuable: control.

In a moment where Canadians felt powerless watching grocery bills rise weekly, Skip gave them tools to fight back — not as consumers, but as participants in their own survival. It’s the oldest marketing truth reframed for a new era: the best way to sell a product is to help people feel smarter, not sold to.

This wasn’t a glossy ad about affordability. It was a data-backed system that turned saving money into a game. And because it relied on real-time supermarket pricing, the campaign updated itself weekly — a living, breathing piece of branded content that never went stale.

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💡 Figment Takeaways

1. Usefulness beats virality.
When times are tough, people don’t need inspiration — they need information. Skip didn’t promise hope; it provided a system. Brands that help audiences do something will always win over those that just tell them what to feel.

2. Don’t say “we care.” Show it in code.
Empathy in advertising is easy to claim, hard to prove. Building tools, not taglines, is how brands demonstrate that empathy at scale. This campaign literally wrote care into its algorithm.

3. Design for the moment of doubt.
Most grocery shopping starts with one thought: “Can I afford this week’s list?” By stepping into that moment with real, personalized help, Skip made itself indispensable. Great brands don’t interrupt habits — they improve them.

4. Leverage AI as invisible infrastructure.
AI here wasn’t a gimmick — it was the unseen labor that made the campaign frictionless. It found prices, generated recipes, and visualized outcomes. The user never saw the tech; they only saw ease.

5. The new “value” is emotional efficiency.
Helping people save time, stress, or mental effort is the next frontier of value marketing. Skip delivered this with humor, humanity, and data-driven precision.

🧾 Figment Line

Don’t sell optimism when people are exhausted — sell clarity.

Or better yet, build it.

Figment is written by Abbhinav Kastura, a writer/producer who has spent a decade making impactful internet videos and Guru Nicketan, an advertising nerd, B2B Marketer, stand-up comedian, and a film buff.