��������pk10

Marks & Spencer is tripling the length of its annual food quality campaign, the first since it formed its own in-house creative team earlier this year.

The Fresh Market Update campaign is again produced by ITV Creative and shows ITV weather presenter Lucy Veraswamy visiting M&S suppliers, building on a set-up established in 2019.

While last year’s campaign featured 24 ads run over six weeks, this year’s will feature an introductory spot followed by four different ads per week (across Monday to Thursday) for the next 18 weeks. 

Sharry Cramond, the M&S Food marketing director, told ��������pk10 it was the “biggest ever quality campaign” the division had run in terms of volume of work, and the most it had spent on media for a single campaign since she joined nearly four years ago. She added it was shaped by the team’s intention to focus on “fewer, bigger things”.

Each week will focus on a different food and supplier, such as salmon next week and later the Davidstow creamery, which has produced M&S’s Cornish Cruncher for the last 17 years.

The media strategy, by Mindshare, again focuses on capturing people’s attention following the early evening news bulletins, while adding more sophistication such as ensuring that on-demand platforms show each week’s string of ads in their planned order.

Cramond said: “We’re planning for 50 per cent of the population to see this campaign at least 18 times. It’s absolutely massive. But TV is only one part of it. We’ve just reached 10 million Sparks [loyalty card] customers, so email and direct customer communication is increasingly important.

“Next week if you buy salmon in our store you will then get an email from us inviting you to hear from Sarah Lass, the M&S Select Farms salmon farmer, about the story behind it, with recipe ideas too. And on social media you’ll be able to swipe right to get that information too.

“We know from customer research, that particularly in a post-Covid world, customers want to know more about the story behind their food; they care about where it’s come from and how it was produced.”

The campaign, backed by econometric modelling and analytics, is aimed at boosting quality and value perceptions and to support the retailer’s desire to pull in more family customers.

“We lead the way on quality perceptions, but when we talk about quality we actually see our value perceptions improve too,” Cramond added.