Yesterday Tesco made the overdue admission that it’s time to freshen up its advertising. Today came further evidence of the chain’s efforts to change the conversation.
Tesco is putting some touchy-feely home movies on its YouTube channel showing all the good work it does bringing sunshine and laughter to a grateful nation, even while it’s losing market share like it’s going out of fashion.
As Tesco puts it, the movies will “show Tesco in action and will bring to life the work that we have been doing over the past year, right across the business”. YouTube will surely need a bigger hamster to power its server when all that extra traffic comes flooding in.
Today’s happy-clappy slice of cinematic joy shows a regeneration partnership in Widnes. You can watch it here.
At first glance the initiative looks like a damage limitation operation, a defensive move ahead of next week’s results. Tesco broker Deutsche Bank, incidentally, is forecasting a 1.7% dip in like-for-like sales for the fourth quarter, in line with the supermarket’s Christmas non-performance.
Or maybe the videos give us a flavour of the direction Tesco might take with its future marketing - a massive shift in emphasis to reclaim its lost status as the shopper’s friend. Considering the blizzard of bad publicity Tesco gets at the moment for more or less anything it does, sometimes rightly and sometimes not, that’s a big ask.
It calls to mind the Conservatives’ patchy efforts to ditch the old “nasty party” tag. Then again, even Tesco on its worst day knows better than to slap a premium on the emblematic pasty.
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