Asda is looking to cement ‘That’s Asda Price’ back into popular culture with a new campaign that puts its price credentials at the fore.
The grocer has been embarking on a turnaround journey over the past couple of years, which has seen it bring back many of its distinctive brand assets. By resurrecting Rollback and Asda Price at the beginning of the year, as well as reintroducing the Asda pocket tap, the supermarket wants to remind customers of what they loved about the brand in the past.
Its latest campaign (and first with new creative agency Lucky Generals) utilises all these assets and wraps them up in a traditional Asda sense of humour.
Asda is looking to cement ‘That’s Asda Price’ back into popular culture with a new campaign that puts its price credentials at the fore.
The grocer has been embarking on a turnaround journey over the past couple of years, which has seen it bring back many of its distinctive brand assets. By resurrecting Rollback and Asda Price at the beginning of the year, as well as reintroducing the Asda pocket tap, the supermarket wants to remind customers of what they loved about the brand in the past.
Its latest campaign (and first with new creative agency Lucky Generals) utilises all these assets and wraps them up in a traditional Asda sense of humour.
‘Barnsley Baby’ focuses on a mum doing the weekly shop who is surprised at the value she is getting for all of the household favourites – it ends with the baby suddenly expressing in a broad Yorkshire accent that it’s because ‘That’s Asda Price’.
For Asda’s vice-president of marketing, Adam Zavalis, the campaign is about going back to “its roots to plant the seed for success” and tap into the hallmarks of the brand.
“That’s Asda Price has awareness over 90% and we know that the pocket tap is in the cultural lexicon of the country,” he tells Marketing Week. “All of us, from marketers to agencies, need to execute that in a way which feels very relevant to today’s hard-working families.”
‘The heart of our DNA is price’: Asda on humour, value and the return of Rollback
Cressida Holmes-Smith, CEO of Lucky Generals, highlights the importance of Asda’s “powerful brand assets”. She previously talked about “digging for the heart of the brand” when Lucky Generals won the contract from Havas earlier this year.
“How do we get people to reappraise the phrase and understand it so it has meaning in their lives?” she says. “By putting it into the mouths of different unexpected characters, we are trying to reinstate it in culture, as a powerful phrase that was picked up by the nation.”
The campaign will run across multiple channels, with the first TV ad launching on Thursday (10 July), with additional 30-second spots to arrive over the course of the summer. In addition to the three 30-second films, the campaign will span all of Asda’s paid, owned and earned channels, including print, digital, social, in-store executions and PR.
Zavalis is excited by the prospect of what Lucky Generals will bring to the Asda brand and praises its past work for understanding “real Britain” and getting to the “heart of culture” – something that he admits Asda moved away from over the years and which he is keen to see it return to.
“As you see from this work, there’s a real consistent platform that has a tone and a distinctive humour that Asda was always known for,” says Zavalis. “This work is really going to bring us back and hopefully get a lot of people talking about us and to get us back into culture for the right reasons.”
Turnabout Asda
It has been a period of great upheaval for the marketing team at Asda.
It was announced in March that its chief customer officer, David Hills, was to step down from the role to join travel business Jet2. Morrisons’ Rachel Eyre was revealed as his replacement in May, and will join Asda as chief customer and marketing officer later in the summer.
Couple all of this with poor performance over the festive season and a slumping market share, you wouldn’t blame Zavalis for feeling disheartened, but he’s measured when speaking about the changes at the business.
“Change happens all the time,” he says. “Rachel is going to bring a lot of experience from Morrisons and Sainsbury’s [where she spent nearly six years], as well as other sectors like Barclays. I’m looking forward to working with her to understand her thinking and how we can help grow Asda together. The transformation job continues.”
It’s not just the marketing function that has seen some upheaval. The return of Allan Leighton as executive chairman of the business after more than 20 years away certainly raised some eyebrows – and he wasted no time in returning Asda to the strategy that worked so well for him the first time around.
Rollback and Asda Price were reintroduced to the business – and its price match scheme with Aldi and Lidl was dropped – as Asda backed itself to win on price. But can it? It’s a very different retail environment now to the one that Leighton left behind. Is price enough to return Asda to glory?
Asda poaches Morrisons’ top marketer Rachel EyreZavalis notes that the business has seen over 10,000 products go through Rollback and onto Asda Price, which amounts to a “third of its range” so far, with the business hoping by the end of the year that “pretty much all” of its major products will have gone through the process.
The results speak for themselves with Asda opening up a 3-6% gap on price compared to the other full-service supermarkets, according to data cited in its Q1 trading update, but Zavalis is aware there is more work to be done.
“Allan himself has said this is not an overnight turnaround. These things take time,” he says. “But all the combinations, from price to availability to our unmatchable mix with George [clothing], gives us a lot more strings to our bow than we’ve had in the last couple of years.”
While the headlines will focus on Asda’s dwindling market share, there are positives to be taken from the wider numbers. Availability is up from 90% to 95%. George is up 3.5% year-over-year and 2% in volume against the competition. Asda Express was up 6% in Q1 as well. The business has also won awards on price and quality in recent months, which it takes as a signal that it is going in the right direction.
“It’s a two-speed approach. Are we making the right long-term play that’s going to pay dividends now, but hopefully into the future as well, while still delivering the day-to-day?” says Zavalis. “We’re moving to a very positive space.”
One thing that has come under scrutiny from shoppers in the shift back to Rollback and Asda Price is the retailer’s loyalty programme Asda Rewards. It has always operated differently from its rivals in that it offers cashback rather than lower prices on certain items – something that Zavalis believes can be a differentiator for the business.
“It doesn’t do what other supermarkets do with their member pricing schemes, where if you are not on this scheme, then you will not benefit from low prices,” he says. “We don’t do that. We’ve invested in Rollback to Asda Price for every single customer who walks through the door or goes on the Asda website.”
Asda drops Aldi and Lidl price match scheme
The challenge will be making the customer – who has become increasingly used to treating the label price as something that will come down with a loyalty scheme – aware that prices at Asda are lower than its competitors from the outset.
Zavalis accepts it is the job of its marketing communications to “cement that point home” that you don’t need a loyalty card to benefit from Asda Price and that its loyalty scheme is to offer added incentives as opposed to label discounts. He hopes that this first campaign with Lucky Generals goes some way to addressing that challenge.
“The point is that we’re not like Morrisons, Tesco or Sainsbury’s. You don’t have to be a member to get Asda Price,” he concludes.
