Asda’s plea to shoppers this week was clear: give us a second chance.
Like an estranged ex hoping to win back a former lover, the supermarket’s Take a Fresh Look campaign hopes to remind thousands of formerly loyal customers who have had their heads turned that no, really, it’s definitely changed this time.
To rekindle the spark, it’s rolling out “one of the biggest” range refreshes in recent years, with 400 new products hitting stores. Core fresh and frozen aisles have been “transformed”, with cleaner PoS and fixturing. Dedicated greengrocer colleagues will also return, with a new Asda Fresh quality promise that guarantees to give shoppers their money back if they’re not 100% satisfied.
Even its Asda Rewards loyalty programme – which some shoppers declared “all but dead” a year ago – is getting a glow-up, with new points earning “missions” and dedicated loyalty offers. This is all underpinned by further investments into lower prices, with hundreds more products passing through its Rollback programme.
“These changes offer customers greater value and choice in areas they shop the most and will improve the in-store shopping experience,” said chief customer officer Rachel Eyre, in her first major customer move since joining Asda from Morrisons last summer.
“They’re about rewarding customers for their loyalty, as well as encouraging those who haven’t been to Asda for a while to take a fresh look,” she added.
A welcome return to retail basics
Cleaner, clearer aisles with more exciting products, plus a rewards programme that actually feels rewarding, is nothing radical. It’s basic retailing in 2026. Yet those basics have been missing from too many Asda stores for far too long and these changes will be warmly welcomed.
But will they be enough? In the eyes of many shoppers, Asda is starting from scratch on the fundamentals, while most rivals – perhaps Morrisons aside – are already delivering them well.
And there’s a credibility gap to overcome. Asda has made bold promises of change like this before, only to quietly slip back into old habits.
In 2021, then chief merchandising officer Derek Lawlor promised to slash SKUs by 40% in an “End2End” reset. In August 2023, Asda pumped £1.2m into refreshing the quality perception of its fresh food-to-go offer.
Yet in the three years since, Asda’s market share has fallen by more than two percentage points, from 13.% to 11.6%. When Allan Leighton returned to the business in November 2024, he said Asda still needed to purge as many as 6,000 products from its range.
The nostalgic return of Rollback in January 2025 has helped to reset Asda’s price position and brought some much-needed morale back into stores. But so far it is yet to deliver a sustained uplift in volumes, even before the six months of disruption caused by the bungled final stage of Project Future.
And looming over all of this are Aldi and Lidl – the new partners with which many shoppers have already moved on. Despite Leighton’s insistence to the contrary, customers are yet to see a truly convincing plan that can lure them back in meaningful numbers.
Asda’s grand gestures might tempt shoppers to take a fresh look inside their local store. But the tougher test will be convincing them it’s changed for the long term – if they’re already happy elsewhere, it’ll take more than sorting out the basics to win them back for good.
No comments yet