cwathen wrote:Nonsense.
You're telling me that people 'down south' have never come across Morrison's?
Where do you come from? By 'down south' do you mean 'in or around London'? Before takeover, there were no Morrisons stores in Cornwall. Before, takeover, there were no Morrisons stores in Devon. And although I can't say for certain that there were none, I had never seen a Morrisons store in Somerset or Dorset either.
Before takeover, Morrisons did not advertise on TV in the south west where such advertising could be regionalised. Before takeover, the only time I had ever heard of or experienced Morrisons was when doing GCSE English and we had to compare some advertising between different supermarket brands - and incidentally, it was NEAB's GCSE course that I did.
I've never shopped at Waitrose, but I've still heard of it.
OK, so you've heard of Waitrose, but never shopped there. Is Waitrose a significant supermarket chain to you? If you're asked to name the first 3 supermarket brands that come into your head, is Waitrose likely to be on there?
You can't go and run two brands side-by-side, it'll cost you an absolute fortune.
Now THAT is rubbish. There are loads of examples of single companies having multiple brands offering the same products. DSG has Currys AND Dixons, SMG has Scottish TV AND Grampian TV, Time Computers has both Time AND Tiny. Rover Group has Rover AND MG.
And to take my point to it's extreme, Alba Group has Alba AND Bush AND Goodmans AND Grundig AND Harvard, all of which could sell AV equipment, AND they have licenced the use of other brands for certain types of product despite allready owning suitable brands for those products (they are allowed to make NTL-branded phones, and Ministry of Sound-branded audio equipment etc). All in all, Alba group products can be sold under one of 20 brand names (and that's not a plucked out of the air figure, go and count the brands on their corporate website). Do you want me to go on?
The Safeway brand was never particularly strong, and it's never been up at the top of the supermarket tree in the way that, say, Sainsbury's has.
The Safeway brand was 'never particularly strong'? How not? Virtually every town of significance across the entire UK has/had a Safeway store. Morrisons on the other hand may have had strong market presence in certain areas, but there are huge swathes of the country in which the brand had no presence at all until less than a year ago. Even now, if you ask people to name what they consider to be the 3 most recognisable supermarket brands, I firmly believe that you are much more likely to hear 'Tesco, Sainsbury's and Safeway' than you are to hear 'Tesco, Sainsbury's and Morrisons'
Morrison's took over Safeway because they had lots and lots of stores, not because they thought ''ooh, let's reinvent ourselves''.
No, but having taken over Safeway they decided to waste no time in getting their brand name everwhere. Buying out Safeway is now going to be used to create the national roll out of their brand which they never had before. My point however is that in buying Safeway they were buying a brand which allready had national recognition, and if they truly wanted to improve their business, they'd do better dropping the Morrisons brand and pushing forward Safeway...or just do the obvious and be called Morrisons where Morrisons is strong and Safeway everywhere else.
The fact of the matter is that, for Morrison's, their strategy (of being cheap and appealing to lower social class of shoppers) must have played off somewhere, because they've just completed one of the biggest supermarket takeovers in British history.
Indeed, because the Safeway brand was a trophy. If it had been the other way around, and Safeway had just completed the takeover of Morrisons, would it have been seen as such a big deal? Somehow, I think not.
To ditch what has clearly been a successful brand and strategy after completing a massive takeover would be rather stupid.
Morrisons is clearly succesful in areas where the brand has been cultivated. But in many areas of the country, they've got to start from scratch. And even in areas of the country where Morrisons was a big brand, so was Safeway too. Personally, I think they should have continued with both brands for at least the next 5 years before conducting a review and deciding on whether to maintain that situation or whether to go with a single brand strategy.
I don't agree at all that they should have immediately started to favour one brand over the other, but if they were going to go that way, sticking with Morrisons was a mistake. What we are seeing here is not the product of months of market research into what makes a good supermarket brand, what we are seeing is the result of a knee-jerk reaction by company directors wanting Morrisons to be recognised nationally and thus building up their business, completely ignoring the fact that with Safeway they aquired a brand which allready had that status and potential; in essence they are now going to spend money to create a brand with the status of one which they allready own. And that makes no sense.
) has decided that computers are no good, and so wants to spread his old fashioned ways to the dismay of those working in Safeway.
