Woolworths brings back ‘Fresh Food People’ positioning in first brand campaign from Leo Burnett

Welcome back Woolworths. I saw this last night and thought that it was so nice to have a feel-good supermarket ad on television again. Any ad that makes me smile is a winner.
Sing along everyone “We’re Woolworths the fresh food……….”

Twenty seven years ago it was a strong competitive position. Now it is lazy and patently untrue. Have the Leo’s people been hibernating for all of those 27 years?

Seems to me Like Groucho has an Ax to grind posting negative comments on every industry sight. Nike’s Just Do It is almost 30 years old. You don’t walk away from something just because its been around. As far as Leo’s hibernating I’d be very worried if i was Coles because they have certainly been woken.

Look forward to hearing from you Groucho under other Pseudonym.

It’s about as fresh as their produce. FAIL

I saw that ad last night and I liked it. Not like the usual Woolworths ads at all. The “Monday, Tuesday” ads were childish and did great damage to the brand at a time when Coles was appealing to working class Aussies with the Status Quo ads which saw them almost close the sales gap with Woolies.

Everybody knows the reality when shopping at Woolworths – no staff are smiling (can’t blame them given their hourly wage), customer service is sub par, ques are always too long, bread is snap frozen from Europe, the fruit is far too expensive especially given we know how much they rip off the farmers, the milk is positioned at the end of the supermarket to encourage you to buy other stuff on the way, use by dates are always too short to encourage people to throw perfectly good food away etc etc.

This is bit of rant but why not actually spend money improving the above instead of spending millions advertising what your not.

I wonder how many of those smiling “staff” in the ad are actual Woolworth employees…

Fresh Food People. Red Spot Specials. Great properties that should never have been thrown away in the first place. They just needed to be ‘refreshed’.

@I smell a rat the difference between Nike and Woolworth’s campaigns is that Nikes positioning is still valid and Woolworths isn’t . [Edited under Mumbrella’s comment moderation guidelines]. And axe has an ‘e’

@I smell a rat and the word is ‘site’, not sight. You’re welcome, happy to help.

@Groucho, there’s an apostrophe in ‘Nike’s”. And it’s ‘Woolworths’, not ‘Woolworth’s’ … 🙂
Cheers!

That would be ‘Nike’s’. Hoist by my own petard damn it…

The problem with making a bold statement like that i.e. the fresh food people, is that you have to be exactly that. Sadly nothing could be further from the truth. Apples kept in cold storage for 10 months and sold as fresh (refer ABC The Checkout), carrots that die overnight if left out of the fridge, ancient mandarins mixed in with new season, meat that has turned grey a week before its used by date. All it takes is one bad experience and all those marketing dollars go up the tube. Truth in advertising Todd, I don’t think so.

Just awful.Worse still,all that money for Jamie and he pops up at the end in a token ‘we had to do something with him’ moment.Clearly Burnett’s didn’t hire him and now can’t fire him.This is an embarrassment for Todd Sampson given he often so harshly judged work from other agencies while at the helm of GruenTransfer.
How the mighty have fallen.

Is that the only people who care enough about this ad to watch it, take it in and have anything to say about it..

Are right here on this site, or sitting in agencies up and down the country.

Nothing to see here, money wasted, client happy, agency happy.

Sorry, but there are no other words for this ad than outdated and terrible. This has actually taken a step backwards compared to the Droga work. The lyrics make me wince. What are Leos actually doing that’s original? They’re going back to an endline and style of ad that Woolies were doing back in the1980s? Coles must be laughing.

@LW but a very fine petard I’m sure……………….

Frankly I loved the work that M&C did for them,like the old Greek couple.the ads better reflected real Australia than this overly polished pastiche from another time and place.

D5 took the brand 0.1 step forward. Leo’s taken it 0.1 step back

How WhiteBread are the TVCs?

seriously ive walked into 5 different woolies and never have seen so much White people as the TVC… can we show a bit of diversity Leo Burnett or is the client brief… Keep it white Australia please #keepItReal #bitofcolourdoesnthurt #tokenBlack, #tokenAsian

I wish my local Woolworths was as bright and chirpy as the one made out in the ad.

As most of the comments have eluded to, its about as fresh as Woolies produce. At least Droga’s efforts told a story and attempted to be authentic. This is just plain old fodder. Cringeworthy. It’s actually so bad it could be a parody. Which would be funnier. When will Supermarkets start actually paying themselves out? Err that’s right. Never.

it really is the same work as 15 years ago, albeit with a different jingle.

The Marketing Director at that time is now running the company…..coincidence?

Isn’t this the same release as this?

https://staging.mumbrella.com.au/woolworths-relaunches-brand-with-new-droga5-work-but-retains-emphasis-on-fresh-food-people-97277

Listen to all you moaners, like you give a rats! You all shop at Thomas Dux anyway….. Park the Beemer honey!

Woolworths has brought back its ‘Fresh Food People’ positioning in a new brand campaign from Leo Burnett Sydney.

The commercial moves away from the ‘Australia’s Fresh food People’ tag coined by Droga5…

Come on people, you’re smart enough to know it’s essentially the exact fricking same thing.

I worked on the Woolworths business well over 20 years ago. Each year we would predictably roll out “Red Spot Specials” and of course “Fresh Food People” was a constant theme. Nothing much has changed. The execution is certainly more polished and the bolt-on Jamie Oliver seems to be a contractual obligation which has survived in spite of him not being too happy with the way Woolworths actually treat farmers.

The difficultly with rolling it out yet again is that Woolworths have absolutely no control over the brand promise. This is very much determined by the in-store quality control of produce managers and their staff. Floppy old celery and sad veggies are the standard fare at either one of 2 Woolies near me. Any complaint is usually greeted with a shrug of the shoulders.

The other aspect in-store are open team meetings including the airing of problems and issues that are held at the back of the store in full ear-shot of the customers

As a result all the pretty pictures, smiling people and the re-polished old jingle land with a loud and resounding thud.

Nothing fresh about Woolworths or this ad… and did anyone else hear how crammed and cheesy those lyrics are? Interesting that so much emphasis is put on the lyrics and music in this ad yet there are no credits? Or perhaps the music house didn’t want to be acknowledged for it?

I saw 2.. count em 2 people from an ethnic background. One was the guy making the sushi, and another was in a shot for a total of 12 frames.

Agree with @DishWasher – how White Bred are these? Hardly representative of the Australian cultural mix.

Was the lyricist paid by the word? It makes the Jeep ads look light for copy.

attention trendy advertising people!

It’s a mass market add for a mass market audience – stop trying to make conclusive judgements based on your own tastes.

@ yeah but this has nothing to do with trendy advertising taste. Joe Average Punter can pick a dodgy apple when he bites into it. I think @blast from the past might be right on the money. Watch Coles nudge ahead in the race.

That is the whitest looking ad in Australia. Where is multicultural Australia?

What a hilariously shit ad and how unoriginal.

My hat goes off to Leos though.

Picture this: pitch for a piece of business, charge more than the incumbent, get briefed, come back and present the old ads you saw.

Now that takes balls of steel.

A great con, love you slight of hand.

The Monthly said it ALL.

I too saw the TVC and wished my Woolworths had a baker rather than the plastic wrap sliced bread, I wish we had a butcher instead of plastic styorfoam meat trays, really stretching the truth guys.

Cheese was obviously on sale 2 for 1 this week.

@alice

a lot of these comments are from trendy advertising people

Joe Average Punter might be able to pick off apples at woolies but it doesnt stop him being coerced into shopping there because he associates this supermarket with fresh food.

@alice FYI carrots aren’t meant to be left out of the fridge. The best way to maintain freshness is to maintain the cool chain … stored apples came about because people want to eat apples year round, not just when they’re in season.

Congratulations and well done, Woolworths.

FINALLY, an ad that is:
Highly branded
Memorable
Talks about the advantages of the offering
Builds and retains memory structures (jingle, brand assets, slogan)
Brings back Woolworths key strength – the relationship between the farm gate and the supermarket
And really nice production too.

After years of criminally ineffective advertising from Woolies and Dreg5, NOW watch the sales and share price go up.

Lovely.

Formidable mes amis!

Spot on!

“Australia is a lucky country, run by second-rate people who share its luck”
Donald Horne coined this exactly 50 years ago. He was right then and his statement, unfortunately, still rings true today.

This is wallpaper. It’s dull, uninspiring and is indicative of the standard output from the dire wasteland of lazy, talentless marketers making decisions in Australia’s biggest companies.

Some commenters here have attacked others who have criticised the work by saying that they’re fancy ad people and out of touch with what real Aussies want.

But why is it that the mass Australian public has to be force-fed outdated stereotypes, bad jingles and forgettable rubbish that has no effect on them in any emotional or intellectual way?

For many years Tesco and Sainsbury’s in the UK demonstrated that supermarket campaigns could be simple and brilliant. And unless I’m wrong, they went down just dandy with plenty of inner city single mums and blue collar suburbanites.

I don’t think we can blame Leo’s for giving them what they want. They’re a good enough agency that is just happy to be paying the bills. It’s the Woolies marketing department that just keep recycling the same brief year after year and fails to think any genuinely original or inspired thoughts of their own.

So why can’t the mainstream Australian marketing industry produce interesting, intelligent work for the mass market? Perhaps Donald would say that is run by second-rate people!

Haha, Woolies have always been the fresh food people even when they weren’t. How about getting the competition’s big red hand and squashing farmers with it now to emphasie the difference ’cause we all love the farmers and their markets : ) Yes, I know it’s a month later and no one is reading this.

The song, the imagery, the screen play of the ads, even the new uniforms with the dinky paper hats, it’s all so 80s and old fashioned.

pretentious wankers abound in this comment thread.

quoting Donald Horne? you can’t be serious!

the ad is simple and works, that’s why they’ve brought it back

god forbid marketers should choose effectivness over art

back to watching Bondi Hipsters, kids

the threat to advertising comes from you – not from procurement people, not from corporate blandness – but from muppets who bleat on endlessly about creativity

as a Woolies shareholder i dont give a rats arse about creativity

and it’s utterly laughable that people are on here claiming that the experience doesn’t match the promise

as if that ever mattered in advertising!