Campbellsville University is in the early stages of opening a grocery location on campus in partnership with Kroger called “Tiger Kroger” in the upcoming academic year. In the developing stages of the project, the CU Marketing Club was invited to help market the project to the student body.
The Tiger Kroger is being created to fill a need for students without transportation who rely heavily on the shuttle to go grocery shopping. The Tiger Kroger will include quick, everyday essentials like lunch meats, hygiene products and essential school supplies. CU Marketing Club President Joel Hatchett said the idea of filling that need shaped their plan from the start.
“We wanted it to largely be marketed to students,” Hatchett said. “It’s open to everyone, but we saw the need that isn’t always fulfilled by the stores we have on campus. For example, foreign students have to catch the shuttle to get what they need and might not have cars. Having a local grocery option would be amazing for that. “
The marketing team has worked tirelessly, creating pitch ideas and general strategies to help promote this store to the students that truly need it. The team has been in contact with Kroger executives and CU administration to make sure they’re on the right track before the final pitch to the executives.
“We’ve been in direct communication with the Kroger executives. We’ll do a pitch for them and get their backing and support behind whatever we’re doing.” Hatchett said. “The Marketing Club was tasked with creating the main campaign for the incoming Tiger Kroger. We’re launching the initial flyers, creating commercials and setting the graphic image.”
Throughout the semester, the club has passed ideas back and forth and developed several strategies to interact with their target market and make sure students know about the store.
“We want to use a text or email form because that’s how students know everything on campus. We’ll use the CU app, Instagram, flyers, posters, sitting out in the caf, QR codes, basically any channel you can think of,” Hatchett said.
The effort the Marketing Club is putting into this project is crucial. From the get-go, Kroger has given the Marketing Club a tough task of making sure to promote the store in a way that will meet Kroger’s sales standards.
The opportunity for the Marketing Club’s campaign didn’t develop on its own, however. Dr. Amanda Ewing, the club’s faculty adviser, said the project emerged as the group searched for ways to gain real marketing experience.
“One of the goals of the Marketing Club…is for students to get real, practical marketing experience. And this was perfect, especially for a first project because they’re marketing to people they know,” Ewing said. “It’s really easy for them to identify the target market when they are part of that target market.”
The Marketing Club is a brand-new club; however, that didn’t slow them down when approaching the project.
“It’s been fairly smooth,” Ewing said. “They have a lot of great ideas. Several of them have already taken multiple marketing classes so they’re familiar with what goes into it and the basic process is the same regardless of the business. So, overall, it’s really been seamless.”
Administration has taken a fairly hands-off approach to their pitch, letting the club design the marketing pitch how they see fit.
“We were pretty much given complete freedom on what we think, and then once they see the pitch, they’ll approve or decline and the Marketing Club will adjust as needed,” Ewing said.
While the Marketing Club has focused on developing the public facing campaign, the university administrators have been working on the overall plans to bring the Tiger Kroger to life.
The university began conversations about the project a little over a year ago, only with the plan coming to fruition recently. Interim Dean of Students Elijah Coey said the idea behind the Tiger Kroger was to bring a safer, more cost-effective form of shopping for students on campus.
“Ultimately, it really comes down to student convenience and safety,” Coffey said. “I have personally seen a lot of students walking towards Walmart late at night and there’s limited sidewalks in that area. It’s dangerous on the road. We wanted to make sure that it was an opportunity to give students fair market value in a safe location.”
Director of Business Operations Trevor McWhorter said those concerns sparked the earliest conversations about how a campus store might work. They discussed how the concept could work, and what it would look like, and eventually extended their conversations to local Kroger management.
“Really it just started as simple conversations of this is a need on campus. How could this work? What could this look like? And then those conversations extended to local Kroger leadership,” McWhorter said. “It just kind of kept widening as the conversation and idea came to fruition and it just materialized in the central store concept that we’ve been working on for the last few months.”
With the project only being in discussion for around a year, there are still a few things to work out, but CU’s administration is working tirelessly to get the project to students as soon as possible.
“Our goal is a spring [2026] launch,” McWhorter said. “I don’t think I can say with full confidence that it’ll be ready at the beginning of spring term, but I would say within the spring term we should be able to open this up for the campus community.”
McWhorter said the store will operate similarly to other student run campus stores, with work-study students helping staff it during open hours.
“It’ll be managed through retail operations, similar to the Tiger Shop,” McWhorter said. “Our plan is 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., but we won’t really know what the traffic is and what the demand is until we get into it… but our working plan up to this point has just been 10 to 10.”
When asked about students being able to use their flexible spending or “Tiger Bucks” at the Tiger Kroger, a definitive answer was unable to be provided at this time, and the store at this moment is intending on only accepting cash or card at its initial launch, but the idea of flexible spending, or a similar idea, is in discussions.
“We are looking at how we can offer pre-added credits or funds to the student ID so that students can use their ID,” Coffey said.
While the initial foundation for Tiger Kroger is set in place, ideas are still being passed back and forth, and things will shift as the project comes to fruition. The Marketing Club will continue refining its campaign as its members prepare to present their pitch to Kroger and administrators say the long-term direction of Tiger Kroger will ultimately depend on what students need and how they respond once the store opens.
“I would encourage our students to continue to be vocal with us,” Coffey said. “Maybe we don’t carry a product that they would like to see there. Let us know that. A huge way that they can do that is just communicating with their SGA representatives. We want to hear the student perspective. We want to hear their thoughts.”
