The proportion of foreign-language speakers is growing fast in Finland and especially in the capital of Helsinki with one in six residents representing a foreign nationality. Services are adapting to this with language choices, but advertising still speaks in only one dominant language.

So when Finland's largest hypermarket chain Prisma was opening a new store in Helsinki’s district of Pasila – where nearly 30 % of residents don’t speak Finnish as their mother tongue – they decided to launch it in a new way. Turning to their core values of equality and openness, Prisma chose to welcome locals to the new store with their own languages:

We collected language data from the store’s surrounding area with block per block accuracy. Based on this data, we translated a welcome invitation to 8 of the most spoken languages in the area: Somali, English, Swedish, Estonian, Russian, Finnish, Spanish and Chinese. The translated messages we’re targeted across 331 OOH media placements according to the language most spoken near each media placement. The message was the same everywhere: welcome to the store of every citizen.

The campaign resulted in the most successful opening week in the hypermarket’s history. But it also grew into something bigger. It became a statement for equality, diversity and inclusivity with 94 % of the audience embracing Prisma as a store truly made for them.