Is this war? Morrisons and #MakeChristmasSpecial

Ant & Dec in the new advertisement.  Picture Daily Star

The last major UK retailer to reveal their Christmas advertising campaign is Morrisons.  This is launching tonight (14 November) during the commercial break in Coronation Street, which should expose the ad to around 7 million viewers.
 
Morrisons' 350,000 Facebook fans were given a preview last night, while the ad was launched on YouTube earlier today.  It was a slow start: at the time of writing the ad was getting about 50 hits an hour on the official page: in the same period last night, Sainsbury's were achieving 150,000 an hour.  Sainsbury's have a theme of war, and the press have been making it clear that competition on the high street is so severe that war is exactly what is being declared on TV and online.

According to the popular press Morrisons are targeting Lidl and Aldi, and using the ad to stress the freshness of their food.  Evidently 2013 found Morrisons shoppers to be "promiscuous", splitting their shopping between the major supermarket and their cheaper German rivals. With like-for-like sales down 7.4% in the first 6 months of 2014, this turned out to be "disastrous" for Morrisions and the new campaign aims to win the wayward shoppers back into a monogamous relationship.

Marketing is the key to Morrisons' turnaround strategy, according to their brand and communications director; the plan is to "ramp up [the] Christmas marketing budget".  Last year Tesco did the same and actually saw a drop in sales of 2.4%.  Morrisons plans to be more clever with their spend: like others it has plans to leverage social media traffic.  This involves music, with the supermarket sponsoring Capital FM's Jingle Bell Ball, and a deal with boy band Union J.  Both of these initiatives are designed to give audiences content to share on social media. Union J have more than 1.5 million Twitter followers, mostly thought to be children or young teens.  The Jingle Bell Ball will associate Morrisons with major acts including Taylor Swift, Take That, OneRepublic and Ed Sheeran.

Morrisions are also behind the launch of a special recording of their Christmas song "It's beginning to look a lot like Chrismas" by Union J, which will be performed at special ''song booths' in some stores where customers will be able to record their own voices over the song and share these via social media.  Sounds like a terrible idea to us, but hey, there's a war on.



Some more point-of-sale promotion (rather than the virtual kind) will come via giant Christmas pudding shaped vans visiting 32 different stores, offering free food and money off vouchers.  This is similar to what online-only retailer Littlewoods is doing with pantomime themed promotions in city centres.

Morrisons are continuing to invest in celebrity endorsement, with the 2014 fronted by Ant and Dec as in previous years.  As we have noted in other posts, celebrities can be very useful in social media if they work for their money, as they generally have much larger fan bases than the retailers.  Morrisons have been attempting to kickstart the campaign via Twitter with the #MakeChristmasSpecial hashtag - a clumsy choice (too long and tricky to spell) which so far has gained no traction online.

In summary, a piece of advertising which will fail to engage with the chattering classes, but which clearly targets a particular audience - "Mums and kids".  Morrisons have thought through the issues and have something in place that may just people sharing its values.  The problem is that, at the time of writing at least, not even the mums and kids have bought into the campaign.