Thinking15 July 2026 · 6 min read
What every brand can steal from Currys
The UK's least-cool retailer turned itself into a social media powerhouse. Here is how, and what it means for the rest of us.
A few years ago, Currys was the shop your parents went to for a fridge. On social it was invisible, and nobody would have called it cool.
Today its TikTok has more than seven million likes, its shop-floor colleagues are minor internet celebrities, and, most tellingly, Currys says its organic social now returns more per pound than its paid advertising. None of that was luck. Here is what any brand can take from it.
The old Currys feed did what most brand feeds still do: push deals and product launches. The turnaround came from flipping the order. Lead with something genuinely entertaining, then let the brand ride in behind it. The deals still appear, but they are the passenger, not the driver. A simple test: if your content could not survive without the logo on it, it is an ad, not content.
Currys' not-so-secret weapon is its staff. In a market full of online-only rivals, a real human you can talk to is the thing competitors cannot replicate, so the colleagues became the content. It works on two levels. The stores are the point of difference the brand most wants to sell, and putting staff in uniform, in a real Currys, means the branding lands even when a video looks completely rogue. It also quietly solved the internal buy-in problem: it is hard to object to content that is visibly, unmistakably yours. (Worth noting, and worth copying: the colleagues who appear get paid for it.)
Which raises the bet most brands get wrong. Faced with the usual choice, hire a paid influencer or cast your own colleagues, Currys went with its own people. Both routes work. They just work differently.
| Paid influencer | Staff as talent | |
|---|---|---|
| Reach | Instant access to their following | Starts from zero, grows with the brand |
| Cost | A fee per post, often steep | A day rate and a little store time |
| Credibility | Trusted within their niche | Trusted on the actual product |
| Brand fit | You are renting someone's vibe | Always unmistakably on brand |
| Product knowledge | Briefed for the shoot | They do this every single day |
| Control and risk | Their feed, their choices | Yours, uniform and all |
| Longevity | One campaign, then gone | A recurring cast people follow |
| What it signals | "A brand paid for this" | "These are the people who'll help you" |
Influencers earn their fee when you need reach fast, or a way into a community you are not part of. But when your genuine advantage is people, as it is for Currys, casting your own staff is cheaper, safer, more on brand, and it compounds. The audience you build belongs to you, not to a creator's next contract.
Everything is now shot on phones, on purpose. The insight is counter-intuitive for a brand with money to spend: do not try to out-polish the best creators on the platform. Match their texture and beat them on ideas. High gloss reads as advert and gets scrolled past; a rough, funny, phone-shot clip reads as native. And when a trend needs a Gen Z voice, Currys hands the pen to its Gen Z colleagues rather than guessing at it. Casting the right writer matters more than the size of the budget.
Currys' brand director has been candid that its best-performing TV film felt "a bit strange" when he first read the script, and the team nearly shelved it. They tested it, it scored highly, and it went on to become their top campaign for ROI. On the organic side the rule is blunter. As their social lead puts it, do it properly or do not bother. Safe content is invisible content.
Trends have a shelf life measured in days, so Currys built its approvals to match. One person signs off the overwhelming majority of content, which means the brand can jump on a moment while it is still a moment. Most brands lose the joke somewhere inside a three-week approval chain. Decide in advance who is allowed to say yes, and then let them.
Here is the part that turns "fun videos" into a boardroom case. Currys built organic social into its econometric ROI model and found it out-performs paid advertising pound for pound. That reframes the whole thing: it is not the team messing about, it is a measured, strategic channel that happens to be funny. Once the numbers landed, Currys stopped benchmarking against direct rivals and started comparing itself to the best social brands going, like Aldi. Raise the bar, then raise it again.
You do not need to be cool to win on social, and you do not need a bigger budget than everyone else. Currys won by being braver, faster, more human and more measured than the brands around it. The lesson is not "make TikToks." It is this: find the true thing only you can say, say it in a way that earns attention rather than demands it, and be disciplined enough to prove it worked.
Want social that is actually funny and actually accountable? Get in touch.