My pet theory is that brands who stick to their values are the ones that will succeed in the hard times ahead. When the dot com bubble was bursting, Apple knew what it stood for (having brought Steve Jobs back) and invented the iPod. William Eccleshare, CEO of BBDO Europe cites Sainsbury’s ‘Feed your family for a fiver’ as great example of its belief in helping customers eat healthy, tasty food for a fair price. But it’s Tesco - that most ruthlessly competitive champion of customer loyalty - that is making news right now for brutally flexing its infamous purchasing muscle to beat up suppliers.
Tesco’s strategy for dealing with the downturn seems to be a rather cynical twist on ‘every little helps’ that the rest of us, like Chris Blackhurst of London’s Evening Standard, might call ‘having your cake and eating it’. Tesco wants to buy off its fickle customers to discourage them from disloyally legging it to the likes of Aldi and Lidl. Fine. But here’s the catch: it expects – nay, demands – that its suppliers foot the bill. A quick squint at Tescoplc.com reveals the company’s values as; ‘no-one tries harder for customers’, and, ‘treat people as we like to be treated’.
‘Except our suppliers’, would seem to be the caveat to both.
But so what? Do customers care? Is it really likely that the new mood of repugnance for irresponsible greed will spill over from the big banks to our biggest grocer and that principle as well as price might drive people from its stores?
All recessions are different to the last. But this one even more so. It’s been so much longer since the last and so much has changed, particularly shopping.
Supermarkets have changed. There are more of them, different shapes and sizes, with different offers, in different places (in 1991, who’d have imagined M&S in petrol stations?) on our local high street and online in our homes to deliver straight to our door.
Shopping has changed. The one-stop-weekly-shop is on its way out; being superseded for many by a smarter kind of pick ‘n’ mix approach that all this extra choice and convenience makes possible. Now, we can save a packet by getting our bog standard staples from one place, our ‘premium’ stuff from another – without having to go there – and buy as we go locally for freshness and convenience. At no extra cost.
And we've changed, too. More of us now care about quality, the provenance of our food and about how supermarkets behave (in the last recession, did the phrase ‘corporate social responsibility’ even exist?). The likes of Waitrose, The Co-operative and smaller regional outfits like Booths in the northwest, trade not only on what they do, but how they do it - their principles as well as their products - and at the same time challenge their competitors on price.
Now, thanks to the many innovations by the big grocers, it’s us who can have our cake and eat it. Tesco, that relentless innovator, seems to have fallen back on a rather 20th Century recession solution of simplistic cost slashing. In hard times people feel unfairness more keenly - for themselves and others. We are more likely to change our behaviour – urgency overcoming the inertia of more comfortable, complacent days. And it quickly becomes habit.
When everything else appears equal, our choices come down to who we like best. Big bad Tesco unfairly squeezing suppliers who are finding it tough enough? Or The Co-operative and Ocado, which strive to do everyone good? It works for Booths; not only is it the UK’s only remaining independent supermarket group but, according to the Guardian, ethical Booths beat all the big supermarket chains last year with a 30% profit rise. Principles pay off, it seems.
Tesco’s slogan is surely one of the most successfully appropriated idioms of all time. But ‘every little helps’ is a bigger idea than simply looking after the pennies. Customers know this, and increasingly know they can save while showing they care.
Wouldn’t it be ironic if, by dumbing down its own mantra and mistaking its values, Tesco found itself caught between a rock and a hard place?
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BTW, whoever did Booths branding – well done! Fresh, appealing, friendly. Spot on.
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