Unless you’ve been living in some sort of home-made canvas tent, eating nothing but dandelion roots and milk from your own goat, you’ll have probably noticed prices going up. Everyone’s talking about how much a tin of beans now costs, and how you used to be able to get a packet of value brand super noodles for nine pence. Just today in fact, I was chatting to a friend about the price of ham, and she confessed she’d started buying gammon joints, boiling them herself, and slicing them thinly for sandwiches. Oh what glamorous circles I move in!
So, with cheap beans spiralling out of my price range, I thought I’d have a look at Tesco – The New Price Drop.
Supermarkets are always competing to be the cheapest, and claim to be continually lowering prices. This seems a little suspicious, given the aforementioned cost of beans, but still, you have to believe don’t you? Otherwise we’ll realise we’re all doomed to bankruptcy and collapse in a sobbing heap, shovelling not-so-cheap noodles into our mouths out of sheer panic and desperation.
The idea behind this campaign is, if only purely from a marketing perspective, an interesting one. Rather than just rocking up to the store and seeing that the price has been reduced on all kinds of useless things you don’t really want, if you go to The New Price Drop on facebook, you can actually pick the products you want to see reduced. A pretty clever social media strategy if you ask me. (It’s all about the consumer engagement don’t you know.)
Now I got pretty excited when I first read about this, thinking I’d be able to bring down the price of all my favourites – gin, Haribo, Magnum ice-creams, that sort of thing – but unfortunately you do only get to pick your favourite from a predefined list.
I thought I’d have a go anyway though, just to see how it worked. First off you pick your area. I’m Bristol, but they didn’t have this, so I had to opt for Avon. (Note to Tesco – Avon was abolished as a county in 1996 and the area split between the Bath and North East Somerset, City of Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire unitary local authorities.)
The you pick the food you’d like to see reduced. As exciting as it would be to see the price of cauliflower slashed, I went in the end for ‘frozen desserts and pies’. Hopefully Magnums fall into this category. Then you just click VOTE. Job done. You’ll know who you’ve got to thank when you’re next picking up your cheap frozen apple strudel won’t you?
I had a quick look at the Tesco home page too, and it poses some interesting questions, like just where should Tesco staff stick their avocados? Polite answers in the comment box below…