Marketing

Asda is known for two famous marketing campaigns. In the "Asda price" campaign, customers tap their trouser pocket twice, producing a 'chinking' sound as the coins that Asda's low prices have supposedly left in their pockets knock together. Hattie Jacques featured in adverts for ASDA in the early 1980s. In the late 1980s, prior to the reintroduction of the tap pocket campaign, advertising for Asda had featured the Fairground Attraction song Perfect.

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In 2004, Sharon Osbourne was selected to be part of a new marketing campaign by Asda; her last advert was aired in August 2005. In the smiley face "rollback" campaign, also used in Wal-Mart advertisements, a CGI smiley face bounces from price tag to price tag, knocking them down as customers watch. The focus of these campaigns is to portray Asda as the most affordable supermarket in the country, a claim that is challenged by competitors, especially Aldi.

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Currently in Asda advertising is a theme featuring singing children and the previous tap of the trouser pocket advertising was reduced to a double-tap on a stylized 'A', still producing the 'chinking' sound. This has included an advert during the 2006 FIFA World Cup featuring the England footballer Michael Owen in an advert with the children singing Vindaloo. The latest advertising campaign has done away with the rollback hook in favour of featuring celebrities Victoria Wood and Paul Whitehouse(amongst others) working as Asda employees.

Asda has been winner of the Grocer Magazine "Lowest Price Supermarket" Award for the past 11 years^[13], and uses this to promote itself across the UK. In August 2005, rival supermarket chain Tesco challenged Asda's ability to use the claim that it was the cheapest supermarket in the country, by complaining to the Advertising Standards Agency. The ASA upheld the complaint^[14] and ordered Asda to stop using it, citing that the Grocer Magazine survey was based on limited and unrepresentative evidence as it examined the price of just 33 products, and that the survey did not study low-cost supermarkets such as Aldi. As a result Asda no longer cites itself as "Officially Britain's lowest priced supermarket", instead using "Winner: Britain's lowest price supermarket award".

For Christmas 2007 Asda reintroduced the "That's Asda price" slogan [4] as well as the infamous 'jingle' to some of its adverts although this was overshadowed by the celebrity endorsed "There's no place like Asda".

Starting in 2008, Asda has been returning to its roots and is now re-focusing on price with its new "Why Pay More" campaign both on TV and in stores. Current Asda tv commercials in February 2008 focus on price comparisons between Asda and its rivals, using the "Why Pay More" slogan and old Dad's Army theme tune.

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History

Asda Stores Limited was founded as Associated Dairies & Farm Stores Ltd in 1949 in Leeds. The formation of the Asda name occurred in 1965 with the merger of the Asquith chain of three supermarkets and Associated Dairies; Asda is an abbreviation of Asquith and Dairies.

For a short time in the 1980s Asda Stores Ltd was a subsidiary of Asda-MFI plc following a merger between the two companies. Other companies in the group were Associated Dairies Ltd, the furniture retailer MFI and Allied Carpets. After the sale of MFI and Allied Carpets the company name changed to Asda Group plc. The dairy division was sold in a management buyout and renamed Associated Fresh Foods [3], meaning that ASDA today has no connection with one of the firms its name was derived from.

Always LOW prices...ALWAYS

Asda Smart Price is a no-frills private label trade name. The range is in many ways the UK equivalent of the generic brands in US stores. The equivalents from the other of the big four supermarkets are Tesco Value, Sainsbury's Basics and Morrisons Value.

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The Smart Price brand can trace its origins to Asda’s Farm Stores brand launched in the mid 1990s, which consisted of products that were offered at a lower price than the equivalent name brand product and ASDA’s own brand equivalent. The Farm Stores brand originally consisted of a small number of food only products, largely frozen such as frozen chips and a small range of ready meals, this range later expanded to include fresh food. In 2000 following the acquisition of Asda by Wal-Mart, the Farm Stores products were phased out and replaced with the new Smart Price brand "based on Wal-Mart's Great Value and Sam's Choice".

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Smart Price products are almost always the lowest price option (known as Cheapest On Display) in a product category in Asda stores. Occasionally this difference is only a few pence, however in others it is a marked difference. For example, a box of Smart Price Biological Washing Powder costs 50 pence while the equivalent Asda brand washing powder costs £1.50 and name brand alternatives cost from two pounds upwards.

The Smart Price label was originally a food only brand, however over the years it has expanded to cover almost every product range in the store. Like early generic products in the US some Smart Price products lack what can be thought of as ‘frills’ in the modern brand name or supermarket own brand, for example the Smart Price toothpaste has an old fashioned screw cap rather than the now more common flip cap and the Smart Price range of crisps come in traditional clear plastic bags rather than the foil bags common to most name brand versions.

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ASDA reduced the price of a pack of ASDA Smart Price 8 thick pork sausages to 16p meaning a sausage was 2p each. It made the headlines in June 2008 as it was during a credit crunch with higher food prices and a higher cost of living.

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