Sweet suspicion

When I started writing Speci last year, I thought this would be a place where we discussed the intersection of brand, marketing and technology. I did not expect to be writing about a supermarket. Yet, today, we’re doing exactly that.

Please stick with me, I hope it’ll be worth it.

If your eyes have been anywhere near a television in the UK over the last two weeks, you may have (definitely will have) noticed that it’s Christmas ad season. Ad spend over the Christmas period is on the rise, and it has been for years. In 2022, £9bn was spent on Christmas advertising alone. It rose by 5% last year to £9.5bn. This year’s spend is projected to be another 8% rise on top of that at £10.5bn, according to Creative Brief.

Christmas really is the UK’s Super Bowl.

Yet the formula for a Christmas ad is remarkably samey for everyone. An emotional scene on a cold winter’s evening, set to a slow cover of a fast song. People looking merrily at each other whilst it snows. Animated characters like Kevin the Carrot saving the day.

So this is why Waitrose’s Christmas ad, or should I say Waitrose’s multi-channel activation of a super fun idea that I can’t get enough of, is so great. I love it. Because it’s completely different from anything, Christmas ad or otherwise.

I say it’s a multi-channel activation, rather than an ad, because that’s what it is. It’s not just a video about a cute Christmas scene, it’s a whodunnit. And Brits absolutely devour whodunnits.

Here’s the 90 second ad they aired to kick the whole thing off:

Great, right? I told you. So let’s talk a little bit about Waitrose today.

Waitgrows

In January last year Waitrose got a new marketing head. Nathan Ansell joined as Waitrose’s Customer Director, and it feels like he’s probably behind a slow but sure shift from Waitrose’s approach to marketing itself. It‘s been happening. I don’t know if you’ve noticed yet.

He, alongside the John Lewis Partnership’s (Waitrose’s parent company) Customer Director Charlotte Lock, have been talking about the brands’ “growth journey” since last year in lots of places like Marketing Week and Raconteur. In May of last year, they hired Saatchi & Saatchi as their new retained creative agency. And clearly it shows.

On a mission to create “modern marketing” that “cuts through”, Waitrose has been building to this festive moment since Ansell joined the company. They’ve expanded their reach on social media by 40% after they joined TikTok and Instagram. They’re working with influencers. They’ve launched a podcast, called The Dish. They’re partnering with Just Eat.

They’re trying lots of new things.

And it really seems to be working. This year, Waitrose has added 1.5 million new shoppers, according to Ansell.

Finding the fundamentals

Waitrose is an older, more upmarket brand. In a cost-of-living crisis, it was at risk of fading into obscurity as more shoppers turned to cheaper alternatives.

Pre-2024, the brand was arguably fading. Watirose's market share was pretty much flat for years. Now it very much isn’t. Its market share is growing again.

This is because they've been rethinking how they do marketing, by looking at their key brand fundamentals:

• Codes: creating consistent and distinctive designs, sounds, taglines, promises (so people remember them).
• Personality: playing with how the brand behaves, from the partner you speak to in store through to the people they’re partnering with on Instagram (so people relate to them).
• Channels: experimenting with where they reach customers with their messaging (so people hear from them in the first place).

The team at Waitrose have been respectful of the heritage the brand has, whilst adding a good dose of humour. It’s different and I like it.

They’ve briefed that refreshed brand approach, with plenty of humour and fun, to their creative partners to Saatchi & Saatchi, to their store teams and to their marketing channel partners.

And little by little, they’ve grown more confident in this refreshed approach. And that has all led to this excellent Christmas ad today.

A perfect whodunnit

So here we are, Christmas 2024. Everyone and their dog is adding to the conveyor belt of Christmas meaning via television advertising. Waitrose have landed on the brilliant insight that Brits absolutely love whodunnits and turn it into an advertising campaign.

And I am here for it. For me, this is better than their counterparts at John Lewis, usually Christmas royalty themselves, because it’s fun and I can play along.

Here’s all the things that are great about the 90 second ad (and the shorter versions) they’ve been airing over the last few weeks:

• Brand coding: Waitrose’s brand colours are everywhere here. The walls, the books, the furniture.
• Humour: it’s genuinely funny. From small touches (Joe Wilkinson perfectly delivers “it’s actually a chilled dessert”) to big payoffs (a Bafta-worthy performance from Fig the cat).
• Celebrities: it’s full of them. Matthew MacFadyen is probably the biggest celeb here given his Succession fame, but everyone else is famous enough, recognisable enough, without being mega-stars you can’t relate to. 10/10 casting, I reckon.
• Format: I mean, come on. This is genius. We love a whodunnit. There is always a new Agatha Christie adaptation and Netflix bought the rights to the Knives Out universe because they know there is a human compulsion towards unwinding a mystery.
• Product: there’s actually a lot of product in the ad. From the hero product, a No. 1 Red Velvet Bauble Dessert (chilled), to a Glorious Treacle Glazed Turkey Crown, the ad spends a lot of time showing you Waitrose products without you realising.
• Fig the cat: there is a truism in marketing: include a dog and it’ll perform better (this literally is true, it has been tested). I reckon it’s true for cats too. Making Fig a character (and a suspect) is funny and broadly relatable, especially when a quarter of all UK households have a cat.
• Cliffhanger: making this into a two-parter (could there be even more?) is great fun. I’m now actively invested (and writing a newsletter about it).

More than just for telly

One of Ansell’s first moves as Customer Director at Waitrose was to open up three new roles in his team – a Head of Brand and Customer Experience (all about defining the brand and how it expresses itself), a Head of Customer Planning and Events (all about planning for the best channels the brand can express itself through) and Head of Customer Channels (all about getting the best media on those channels and making the brand look great).

The three folks who’ve taken these jobs have done a great job. There’s a remarkably consistent thread here through loads of channels. I went into a Waitrose the other day and some partners were wearing T-shirts emblazoned with “I THINK STEVE DID IT”. No other context. Amazing.

There’s apparently going to be physical evidence board at King’s Cross. Their socials have extra, behind-the-scenes-like content. You can see the profiles of everyone at the party and even vote for who you think did it on a custom webpage (where you can also buy the food featured in the ad).

I voted for Fig, obviously. Fig is the prime suspect amongst the voting population. Obviously.

This campaign “…bridges the gap between Christmas advertising and big-audience entertainment”, according to Saatchi & Saatchi‘s Chief Creative Officer, Franki Goodwin. I think this is right. To create big-audience entertainment that people actually want to engage with is so rare, and will be so effective, too.

Especially when it’s supposed to be an advert.

More of this, please

This is brand done right. Will it lead to immediate sales? Maybe? Maybe not. But this does pitch Waitrose right back up into the minds of customers.

I wanted to write about Waitrose today because I love the campaign, but I think there’s a wider lesson here that we forget when we don’t work in FMCG or retail. Yes, tech companies, I’m talking to you.

We think that marketing is about converting people to click on a performance marketing ad at the cheapest possible price. Get people in the door at a reasonable CAC.

This is a small part of marketing in reality. Marketing, actually, is about making people think or feel something about a brand so that that brand enters a customer’s consideration set. And the next time they have a problem that brand can solve, they first think of that brand to buy from or to use. That’s it.

Waitrose, I think, gave themselves a better chance at being in that consideration set this year, as households all around the UK welcome in their friends and family with fancy food and fancier drinks. They did this with humour, personality, celebrities, a cat, and by not taking themselves too seriously. By having fun.

Many of you, I know, are marketers, product managers, designers or engineers at tech brands or start ups. I think there’s maybe a lesson for us here. Not necessarily for Christmas, but for whenever.

How might your brand do a Waitrose?