#414 2025 · Ziploc · Consumer packaged goods / retail promotions
Ziploc let shoppers redeem their expired coupons — as long as a Ziploc bag was in the cart
the problem
Expired coupons are pure loss for shoppers and a dead end for the brands that issued them
background
Grocery coupons expire constantly, and once they do, retailers and manufacturers treat them as gone — the standard response is a reminder email before expiration, or nothing at all after. For shoppers, an expired coupon is a small, forgettable loss; for brands, it's a missed transaction and a slightly worse opinion of the retailer, with no mechanism to recover either side of that.
Ziploc, a preservation brand by category — bags and containers people buy specifically to keep things from expiring — had no obvious operational connection to coupon logistics. But the metaphor was sitting right there: a brand whose entire product category is about not letting things go to waste, applied to a kind of waste nobody had thought to preserve.
what everyone would do
The standard way for a CPG brand to drive short-term sales is to run its own discount promotion — a new coupon, a limited-time offer, a loyalty bonus — competing for attention against every other brand's own promotions in the same crowded space. That approach treats customer acquisition as a zero-sum fight over shoppers who are already being marketed to constantly, rather than looking for a moment where the brand could be the only one solving a problem the shopper actually has.
what they saw
Ziploc's team saw that expired coupons are a near-universal, brand-agnostic annoyance — 99% of digital promos reportedly go unused — that had nothing to do with Ziploc's product category on the surface, but everything to do with it on the level of metaphor: Ziploc's entire business is keeping things from being wasted or lost to expiration. Rather than run another standalone Ziploc-specific promotion, the brand could position itself as the fix for a completely different, unrelated kind of expiration (a coupon) that shoppers already lose money to constantly, and use its own product category as the natural, on-brand redemption condition.
the move
Ziploc built PreservedPromos.com: shoppers upload a photo of any expired food coupon — competitor brand or Ziploc's own, from any retailer — and receive a new discount worth up to $4, redeemable at major retailers, on the condition that a Ziploc product is in the cart at checkout.
why it works
By accepting any expired food coupon — competitor brand, any retailer — Ziploc built a genuinely useful tool that had nothing to gain from restricting itself to Ziploc's own promotions, which is precisely what made shoppers willing to use it: a tool that only 'preserved' Ziploc's own coupons would read as a gimmick, but one that rescues any expired coupon reads as a real service, with Ziploc's brand attached to the rescue rather than the restriction. Requiring a Ziploc product in the cart to redeem the new offer converts every use of that free, useful tool directly into a Ziploc purchase, aligning the shopper's incentive (recover lost savings) with the brand's incentive (drive a sale) without asking the shopper to do anything extra beyond what they'd have wanted anyway. This is why the campaign drove measurable acquisition (14% new buyers) and redemption (49%) rather than just brand awareness — the mechanism didn't ask people to like Ziploc more, it gave them a concrete reason to put a Ziploc product in their cart at the exact moment they were already shopping to save money.
the payoff
A 14% increase in new buyers, a 49% redemption rate, a 61% increase in Ziploc's share of voice, and participation from more than 80 retail partners spanning over 65,000 stores, according to both official sources read for this case.
where it breaks
This mechanism depends on finding a genuinely universal, brand-agnostic frustration that plausibly connects to the sponsoring brand's core value proposition by metaphor or theme — a poor fit (a car brand 'rescuing' expired coupons, say) would read as an arbitrary gimmick rather than an authentic extension of what the brand already does. It also depends on the redemption condition being a low enough bar that shoppers who came for the free fix don't feel tricked into an unwanted purchase — a program that felt more like bait-and-switch than a fair trade would damage the brand's trust rather than build it. And because the free tool (rescuing any expired coupon) has to be genuinely useful independent of the sponsoring brand to earn shopper trust in the first place, a version that too obviously favored the sponsor's own coupons over competitors' would undercut the exact universality that made the mechanism credible.
what came after
'Preserved Promos' won the Creative Commerce Grand Prix and four additional Cannes Lions in 2025, and is cited in retail-marketing coverage as a model for converting a universal, brand-agnostic annoyance — expired coupons — into a proprietary customer-acquisition channel.
references
- [1]PR Newswire — SC Johnson Wins Grand Prix and Five Cannes Lions for Ziploc 'Preserved Promos' CampaignPR Newswire, 2025prnewswire.com
- [2]WPP — VML: Ziploc's Preserved PromosWPP, 2025wpp.com