Morrisons is the last supermarket to opt for a celebrity-fronted ad campaign, recruiting former Big Brother presenter and Any Dream Will Do Judge Denise Van Outen to be the face of its new ads.She joins a throng of celebrities pushing supermarkets.
Jamie Oliver has been fronting Sainsbury's ads for years and Lisa Tarbuck is the latest celebrity to be shown working in Asda.Only Tesco is currently showing a celebrity-free advertising campaign, but it has used its fair share in the past, most recently Martin Clunes promoting its milk.
Getting famous folk to front campaigns does seem to work though and Morrisons has certainly seen its figures shoot upwards on BrandIndex.
The latest campaign concentrates on a message of fresh food: fish that has never been frozen, cakes and bread made in the store on the same day and freshly made sandwiches.
It shows Van Outen listing what she demands when she's out shopping for food, showing her pushing her shopping trolley across a field and on a fishing trawler, before finally returning home to buy all she wants at Morrisons.
The ad finishes with the new slogan, "Fresh Choice for You", replacing the old "More reasons to ..." tag line.
Looking at BrandIndex, it has had an obvious positive effect upon brand perceptions. Since the ad first aired on 23 July, Morrisons' figures have shot up. Buzz rose all the way from +5 to +11, quality rocketed from +7 to peak at +17 and the other measures all show smaller rises.
Unfortunately for Morrisons though, the boost from the successful advertising campaign comes at exactly the same time as the news that it is being investigated in connection with a outbreak of E.coli in Scotland.
And if past cases of brands associated with food contamination are any guide, all those positive changes will rapidly disappear.
- Methodology YouGov's BrandIndex is a daily measure of public perception of more than 1,100 consumer brands across 32 sectors, measured on a seven-point profile, with data delivered on the next day.
YouGov interviews 2,000 people each weekday, more than half a million interviews per year.
This means you can spot trends as soon as they happen, not when it's too late. Respondents are drawn from an online panel of more than 130,000.
The score is the net rating: people are asked to identify the brands to which they have a positive response, and then those to which they have a negative response, to whatever is the prompt measure.
The net score is the positive minus the negative.
The seven measures that make the complete profile are below.
Each is taken independently - in any one survey, any individual respondent is asked about only one measure for the sector, not all seven. Therefore, none of the readings influence each other within the survey.
1. Buzz
2. General impression
3. Quality
4. Value
5. Satisfaction
6. Recommend
7. Corporate reputation
In addition, we supply an index score.
by Sundip Chahal
www.brandindex.com.