Waitrose: in the Shadow of the Penguin

Heston Blumenthal: dropped from
the Christmas advertising in 2014

Waitrose is another retailer that decided not to use celebrities in its TV advertising in 2014.  At least this is how the supermarket announced the new campaign.  It is slightly misleading as celebrity chef Heston Blumental continues to work for Waitrose, but his focus is far more on cooking, with the results being posted to the firm's YouTube pages.

Waitrose is part of the John Lewis group of companies: the department store arm of the business has been making headlines with the runaway success of its 2014 campaign, featuring Monty the Penguin.  But Waitrose started its campaigning early, with the launch on October 15 of  'Donate Your Voice', where ordinary members of the public were encouraged to record their voices singing a Dolly Parton song, with the final result being a compilation of voices in a single released for charity.  This was an ambitious attempt to achieve three things: to build brand value, to gain points for Corporate and Social Responsbility (CSR) and to encourage digital engagement.

The results of Donate Your Voice were released as a short video on YouTube on 10 November.  This was shortly after the launch of a separate, dedicate TV advertisement from Waitrose, called The Gingerbread Stall.   The latter was broadcast, but has also clocked up over half a million viewings on Youtube to date.  The Voice piece, by contrast, has had 125,000 viewings.

It seems a pity that Donate Your Voice seems to have been overshadowed by both Monty the Penguin and by the Gingerbread advertisement.  The single, which had been talked up as a possible Christmas Number One has not got into the charts, while the John Lewis music (Tom Odell's Real Love) rose to number 7 in the middle of October before dropping back.  The proceeds from Real Love were earmarked for the World Wildlife Fund: three separate charities are due to benefit from the Donate Your Voice campaign.



The viewing figures comparison is misleading, as voices from the earlier campaign featured in mainstream TV commercial.  This encourages audiences to download the single.  Curiously, given the company's apparent mastery of social media, the Waitrose Facebook page does not appear to have promoted the advert at all - it linked to a 'behind-the-scenes' film about the ad, before continuing to talk about foods and recipes as normal.  Strange, as Waitrose has more than 200,000 fans on Facebook.  The lack of attention given to the advertisement was replicated on Twitter (Waitrose has 172,000 followers), where there was a token reference to the behind-the-scenes video and nothing else.  Since then more food, recipes and the celebrity chef.  No hashtag, no apparent effort to leverage the social media value of the Donate Your Voice campaign.  Business as usual.

John Lewis, by contrast, has gained maximum value from its TV commercial and built a mass of social media engagement around it.  Waitrose seem to have had some good ideas built around their core brand values of people and altruism, but hasn't followed through with them.  Their half million viewing on YouTube look impressive, excepdit when compared to the 17 million that Monty the Penguin has been able to achieve.