Lidl has been warned that it risks alienating its core customer base by ditching door-drops to plough its spend into TV, social media and cinema advertising.
The new £20m strategy, devised by TBWA, goes live on September 4 and is designed to attract more customers from the likes of Tesco, Waitrose, Asda and Morrisons.
Revealing the campaign, Lidl UK managing director Ronny Gottschlich said: “We’ve been really German in the way we are dropping leaflets through letterboxes saying ‘you have to read this and see our prices and come and shop’ …
“We needed to change to become more of a British retailer not just by what we offer and our quality and price perception but how we engage with our customers.”
The social media campaign will run under the #Lidlsurprises banner, while the TV ads will feature shoppers tasting and buying champagne, steak and cheese at an unbranded “farmers market”. They will be backed by online activity; Lidl’s Facebook page has more than 650,000 followers.
But industry insiders have warned Lidl that it risks losing touch with its core shoppers, particularly older people and the less well off, who were less likely to follow it on Twitter or monitor Facebook.
“If you are a supermarket you can be quite sophisticated with a leaflet drop choosing particular streets or blocks of flats,” one insider told the Guardian. “You can’t do that with social media.”