Leading brand Tesco are leading in the drop in market share this Autumn.  The FTS100 reported a decrease in sales that is in fact the worst reported for the brand in two decades.  In an attempt to maintain market share, the supermarket has launched a string of low price marketing campaigns, including one that claims to be 10% cheaper than the competition on every product.  It is fair to say that consumers are not satisfied with just one supermarket and have taken to hopping between chains in order to find the cheapest deals.  What are other supermarkets doing…?

The more Tesco drop their prices, the more brands such as Asda, Sainsbury’s and Morrison’s, and even Waitrose, drop theirs! A recent report from the Guardian suggests that the fastest growing supermarket, Aldi, is more determined to produce goods that are priced significantly lower in response to the negative economic headlines.  Will this be enough to secure their place as one of the UK’s top supermarkets? Maybe not. We have discussed in recent blogs the pressure that companies are facing in the future and the implications of consumers demanding lower priced goods as opposed to sticking with one brand that they have been loyal to for many years.  Although supermarkets such as M&S and Waitrose are well established, high end retailers, Waitrose in particular, are moving toward price based marketing as a way to win back consumers who have gone down a level to supermarket, Sainsbury’s.

The knock on effect of price based marketing from one retailer has significant implications on the rest of the market, even the ones at the top of the food chain! The question is how long will this last? What does that mean for the future of the industry, could the monopolistic industry shift to a more saturated market? Maybe that would be a good thing.

Any thoughts on the future of supermarkets…?

This is now day three of the Blackberry crashes and users are NOT happy. Blackberry have displayed some critical errors in dealing with their upset customers this week. A brand which prides itself on top technology aimed at businessmen while still branching out to younger users with its BBM technology, has failed miserably this week by leaving its customers without email or the BBM messaging network.

It was bad enough that their customers were left without mediums for messaging others but was only made worse by the initial lack of communication from the company itself! This was a fatal error which will affect the way the brand is viewed thanks to frustrated users venting on social networking sites such a twitter. As we know, Social Media is becoming a powerful tool in the marketing industry and it may be that it can be just as negative to brands as it can be positive. It will be interesting to see in the coming days and weeks how Social Media affects the Blackberry brand in the aftermath of these crashes.

After the company was slow to comment on the collapse of certain tools on their devices, word finally did arrive in the form of message through twitter declaring that the company was experiencing problems. Bearing in mind the amount of time which had elapsed between the problems occurring and this message, it’s safe to say that Blackberry users found that message a little frustrating!

This message was later followed by another which spoke of them having problems with a core switch failure within Blackberry’s owner, RIM’s, infrastructure. There is a back-up switch but for some reason this did not work. So, that was the second day of the blackouts and now on the third day the services have crashed again. Blackberry/RIM, did not explain that it was happening again and merely acknowledge the problems when confronted. We can all learn a lot, in terms of marketing, from Blackberry/RIM’s approach to this crisis – and, unfortunately,  not a lot of it is good…