‘Morrisons often delights in swimming against the tide’

There’s a famous scene in Mad Men when smooth-talking, sharp-suited ad man Don Draper pitches to Kodak about how he would sell ’the wheel’, the then new-fangled saucer-shaped device that drops slides sequentially into a projector with a satisfying gulping sound. (If you haven’t seen Mad Men or if you’re under 35, you might have to Google it).

“It’s not called the wheel,” says Don Draper quietly as he projects slides of his sweet young children on to the screen. “It’s called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels. Around and around. And back home again… to a place where we know we are loved.” Cue silent weeping from the hard-nosed clients and colleagues.

But behind the slick Matthew Weiner dialogue and pitch-perfect score, there is a fundamental truth here: nostalgia is potent. As Draper said moments earlier, nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound. It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.

I thought about this sentiment earlier this year when we were planning the new Morrisons brand platform and discovered that the ’More Reasons’ campaign – which last saw sunlight 17 years ago – still resonated with customers more strongly than anything we had done since.

So we decided to bring it back – updated, refreshed and with a different perspective (the view from the customer), but still the same gleaming idea.

Morrisons often delights in swimming against the tide. So as the only supermarket that actually makes much of the food we sell, we’ve recently invested further in being food makers. We’ve kept our fresh food counters – we call them Market Street – when almost everyone else is closing theirs.

“As the only supermarket that actually makes much of the food we sell, we’ve recently invested further in being food makers”

We still believe that having qualified butchers, bakers and fishmongers actually makes a real difference to customers. We’re British farming’s single biggest direct customer and rather than just wave a flag we have kept our pledge to only sell British fresh meat.

It seems that nostalgia is everywhere in British grocery retail – new own brands sound like companies from 100 years ago; produce looks and sells better from wooden boxes rather than plastic trays; paper bags are preferred to plastic ones; we love a straw boater on a fishmonger; gingham lids on jam remind us of granny’s own… the list goes on.

Nostalgia works. Is this because we all yearn for a simpler, gentler time? Well, not really. When it comes to freshness, choice, availability, the environment, health and convenience, customers want precisely zero nostalgia.

Quite rightly, they want the most modern logistics and technology that money can buy to help them buy what they want, when they want, how they want, that doesn’t harm the environment and is delicious, nutritious and healthy.

Like Don Draper said, nostalgia is delicate but potent. And, I would add, complex. Or as Sir Ken Morrison once said, it’s really about traditional values but with modern methods.

Looking back at the evolution of the Morrisons brand since More Reasons was quietly shelved all those years ago it struck me that, like Don Draper’s carousel, we too have travelled around and around and back home again to a place where we know we are loved.