Forget beef pies and pasties. Think dill drizzle, high class wines and balsamic blueberries. Morrisons has signalled it is intending to revamp its Home Counties supermarket stores with a stylish makeover and a bigger presence - 60% of its new outlets will be in the south. Is this a convincing move upmarket for the Bradford grocer?
The (not so) common touch
It will need to be if Morrisons, a store better known for no-nonsense cooked meat products and value-for-money basics, wants to compete with the likes of Ocado and Waitrose. Morrisions is also paving the way for a move online. New stores are being built in Croydon, Harrow and Colindale, North London. The next three years will see its southern presence bring an extra two million households within a 15 minute drive of its stores, it claims.
But any move upmarket will need to be carefully choreographed given the huge pressure many consumers are under. "We are seeing shoppers skipping meals so they can save cash to feed their children," Morrisons boss Dalton Philips told the Mail. "They are hiding treats around the house to ration them through the week, dipping into savings and recycling their clothes."
Online presence
Not the kind of customer profile which typically splashes out on £15 bottles of wine or lamb shanks with redcurrant and rosemary jus. Yet.There is also intimations from the Morrisons boss that the supermarket is set to make a significant foray into online retail. The move online is being aided by a 10% stake in US food website FreshDirect - boss Dalton Philips confirmed Morrisons staff had learnt much from a recent Stateside FreshDirect visit.
"Multi-format, multi-channel" is just one of the phrases peppered on a Morrisons press briefing, plus "experiential over purely functional" and "skills not just drills". There's ambition behind the jargon.
More stories
Source: money.aol.co.uk
No comments:
Post a Comment