Asda marketing chief Rick Bendel is confident the advertising regulator will dismiss rivals’ complaints about its 10% cheaper guarantee.
Bendel told Retail Week: “We’re not concerned about the complaints about the 10%; we’re confident we won’t have to change it.”
Last week it emerged that Tesco and Morrisons had made fresh complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) about the Asda Price Guarantee, which was relaunched in January, claiming to be at least 10% cheaper.
This followed earlier complaints about the guarantee, which the ASA ruled on last week, stating that the Walmart-owned grocer needed to be more specific in its ads.
Bendel said: “It was always our plan to be able to give customers absolute certainty about the price difference. Once we got into it [the Asda Price Guarantee] we realised the scale of the difference, then Walmart gave us the investment to guarantee the difference is 10%.”
He said Asda had consulted with the ASA and with Clearcast, an organisation that helps companies simplify the process of getting ads on air, before launching the 10% guarantee.
He said: “Since we relaunched with the 10% guarantee we’ve seen a step up in the numbers using it, and a step up in new customers.”
Bendel told Retail Week last year that he hoped the Asda Price Guarantee would become as powerful as Clubcard is to Tesco. He said this week: “It’s providing us with a lot of information on how customers shop, their habits, and this information is rich.”
Asda is to open the first shopping centre location for its Asda Living non-food store at Wakefield’s Trinity Walk, opening in spring. Asda Living head of acquisitions Keith Wilson said Trinity Walk was a “rare location” in that it is a shopping centre but still meets Asda’s requirements.
He said the move did not mean Asda would be going into more shopping centres in the future, rather it would continue to focus on retail parks in its bid to become number one in non-food by 2015 with 150 Asda Living shops.
Property agent Cushman & Wakefield acted for Asda, while Lunson Mitchenall and Angermann Goddard & Loyd acted for Trinity Walk.
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