Client newswrap: frugal shoppers and digital marketing

Retailers

Dear John (Lewis) letters will get put on the internet as the retailer uses consumers’ product suggestions and contextual promotions to its website, to boost online sales.

Money too tight to mention? Home-entertainment retailer HMV hopes to drive customer loyalty with the launch of a purehmv reward card offering consumers ‘money-can’t-buy’ products and experiences.

You’ll (almost) be able to shop in your sleep at a £3m joint hotel and supermarket site in Newcastle-Under-Lyme, Staffordshire. Budget brand Lidl will take 14,000sq ft on the ground floor, while an 82-room Travelodge will use the top five floors on a previously redundant site.

There’ll be singing in the valleys when discount food chain Aldi invests around £50m in new stores across North and mid Wales over the next five years, creating more than 150 jobs.

Mr Bond is expecting the UK’s licence to thrill to be revoked by the credit crunch as the economic downturn creates a generation of shoppers focused on low prices, cutting waste and spending more time at home. Asda chief executive Andy Bond said this week: “We are moving into an era of the frivolous being unacceptable and the frugal being cool.”

Brands

Tea for two? Twinings is sending out two mailers offering customers money off, in support of its seasonal catalogue, in a two-pronged Christmas direct marketing push to drive sales and increase repeat orders of its hot beverages.

Not content with turning a sleepy Cornish fishing village into ‘Padstein’, TV chef Rick Stein is rolling out a series of branded preserves and chutneys at Selfridges. The chef’s The Seafood Restaurant and the University of Brighton’s School of Service Management developed the packaging.

Pepsi is getting online to help its bottom line. The soft drinks firm is promoting its internet-linked quick response codes on Pepsi Max cans, via a digital campaign using a film, featuring model Kelly Brook.

Walkers is hoping a red sky delights more than just shepherds when it launches its new Redsky upmarket crisp brand in March on the back of a multi-million pound ad campaign.

Liking the odd glass of beer is no longer enough, Diageo wants us to “Love the Pub”. The drinks giant is launching a marketing initiative to help rejuvenate the flagging pub trade, by making it appeal to a wider demographic.

Japan’s Sony Corp announced this week that it would cut about 10% of the company’s 57 manufacturing sites worldwide and with the loss of 8,000 jobs.

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