The supermarket's new strapline will now be: "fresh for you every day". The chain says it will concentrate on more organic products with a reduction in unhealthy fatty foods and high salt products.
Last month, Morrisons moved its media planning and buying interests from Mediaedge:cia Manchester to the WPP agency's London office. The creative account is also handled in London by Delaney Lund Knox Warren. Winning the Morrisons account was DLKW's biggest win of 2006, valued at £37m.
The supermarket chain said that, following an internal business review, it would invest £450m in its new store programme. This will include £35.5m being spent on the rebrand in 2007/2008.
Along with the redesign of in-store displays, Marc Bolland, chief executive of the chain, said it will be "freshening up" the brand, which will include decluttering its stores and a change of logo for the first time in years.
Presently, it strives to give stores the "atmosphere of a market" but has admitted that with this ethos it makes stores difficult to navigate, especially in cramped stores. The chain will also be extending trading hours in a third of stores as part of the rebrand.
The start of the change will be signalled later this spring with the launch of a new ad campaign. This will introduce the new tagline replacing "more reasons to shop at Morrisons", which the chain has used for 30 years.
Bolland said: "Customers like the atmosphere of the market created in a Morrisons and love to find a bargain in an unexpected place. But they tell us they do not like clutter, and in some of our stores, particularly smaller stores, we make it too difficult to navigate around. So we will be decluttering our stores and also freshening up our brand. This will be signalled by the change of our logo.
"Our overall programme requires investment, which I believe will deliver returns. Over three
years, we will invest approximately £450m on top of our normal annual capital requirements, which we estimate to be £400m including our new store programme. I anticipate that we will deliver £200m of annual profit enhancement by 2010, over and above the first phase of the optimisation plan announced last year."