Comment: Morrisons puts focus on quality and service

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Morrisons’ festive trading figures were a bit gloomy. The grocer suffered a limp end to 2012 amid heightened competition from all flanks.

Tesco is back on its game, Sainsbury’s continues to battle hard and Asda will almost certainly have outperformed its Yorkshire rival.

Many shoppers clearly traded up to Waitrose for Christmas and, at the other end of the market, Aldi continues to post insanely strong growth, thanks in no small part to its brilliant TV ads.

Which brings us to the news that Morrisons has decided to address the problem that I highlighted in my last outing on this page - the fact that it has singularly failed to communicate the quality of its in-store proposition to both new and existing shoppers.

It will no doubt be paying handsomely to have vertically-challenged Byker Grove stalwarts Ant and Dec express this message on its behalf, as they front a new campaign driving home its competitive advantages, such as the 5,000-plus trained butchers, bakers and fishmongers that Morrisons has over its rival chains.

Recent campaigns have seen Morrisons banging an increasingly hollow pricing drum, and a shift to a quality and service message is welcome.

The new marketing campaign is a decisive move and one hopes that it will be followed up by similar decisiveness over grocery ecommerce.

While there is eternal debate over the economics and profitability of grocery home delivery, I’m beginning to think that it has become something of a non-negotiable expectation from most grocery shoppers.

Morrisons has undoubtedly lost many thousands of shopping trips to rivals with online capability and its absence from Morrisons’ array of channels is starting to look like a gaping strategic chasm.

Not many supermarkets earn much (if anything) through grocery dotcom, but if it’s a case of either you or your competitors being able to offer a less profitable shopping trip to a shopper, then it might as well be you. Call it a cost of doing business in this increasingly sophisticated and cut-throat sector.