The supermarket industry has regularly used advertising and special offers to both increase over-all demand for their stores and also for individual and seasonal products.
Waitrose, the high end supermarket chain, recently abandoned its policy of not working with celebrities to endorse their products, by signing two world famous celebrity chefs on a three year deal. Delia Smith, a recipe writer, leading author and TV presenter joined forces with Heston Blumenthal, a maverick chef famed for egg and bacon ice-cream, cooking with dry ice and other such inventive creations in the kitchen, to front the advertising campaign.
The campaign involves Smith and Blumenthal filming a series of television adverts as well as appearing on billboards and in magazine features. The advertising strategy for Waitrose is to demonstrate a number of seasonal products being used in a recipe every week, in television commercials, backed up by a poster campaign and in house special offers. Most of the adverts are a short cookery program, with one or both of the cooks demonstrating the recipe, some adverts last the whole advertising break of three and a half minutes. Richard Hodgson, Waitrose's commercial director, said: "Every week will be a totally amazing new idea. Sometimes it will be a recipe, sometimes visiting a supplier or farmer, maybe even demonstrating a kitchen utensil," He promised that viewers would not be bombarded with some of Blumenthal's more wacky recipes. "Don't worry; we won't start selling snail porridge or liquid nitrogen. But I don't see why Heston couldn't demonstrate how a blow torch can be used to get the top of crème brûlée crispy."
Ocado, Waitrose’s distribution partner has restructured their website to allow customers to order products direct from the online recipe. Waitrose have allocated prime locations on the end of the refrigerated isles with all the ingredients for the weeks campaign grouped together and on a special offer price.
