Tesco ads to promote quality of e-commerce service

Wednesday, January 23, 2013 - 09:37 by Simon Crisp

Tesco is quite prolific with the advertising of its various products and services, but this spring it is looking to draw attention to its online grocery offering, with a fresh series of QoS-oriented TV spots.

Marketing Week reports that the ads are intended to show that Tesco takes a lot of care when fulfilling orders that its customers place via safe shopping online.

Spokesperson, Paul Morris, explained that online orders are selected by personal shoppers who are instructed to choose food items which look fresh and have the best possible use by dates, thus echoing the same techniques used by consumers when they head out to stores in person.

This month also saw Tesco establish another of its so-called 'dark stores,' which now total five across the UK. Seven hundred people will be employed at this new outlet in West Sussex and it will be a base of operations for the chain's programme of safe shopping online in the area.

It seems likely that the future of big supermarkets like Tesco lies not in the establishment of supersized out of town stores, as it did in the past, but in online sales driven by quality and convenience.

E-commerce grocery sales were up by 15 per cent in the final quarter of last year and Tesco is just one of the companies that is fighting for a bigger slice of the pie.

Humanising the online shopping process through ads is definitely sensible, since most people might expect to get a slightly slapdash service, if the selection of products is carried out behind closed doors.

Tesco is running its new ad campaign from today, so you may well encounter the TV spots at some point in the coming weeks. Whether or not this will convince you that Tesco offers a better e-commerce experience than its rivals, is another matter.