liquid, digestive biscuits, bacon, bread … it offered an entire weekly shop on a cut-price budget. But what made Tesco such a pioneer was that it started to analyse customer data in astonishing levels of detail thanks to its Tesco Club Card, which had been launched in 1995. It had on file the postcode, date of birth and detailed spending patterns of millions of its customers. What day of the week you bought Tesco Value cheddar, when you splashed out on Brie, where you filled up with petrol, when you bought a pregnancy kit and even whether it had been positive (all those vitamin pills, and a drop in sales of white wine). The company was sitting on a database more valuable than the Office for National Statistics.
This data was initially used to help it be more accurate when it mailed out certain offers – there was no point posting a 10p-off voucher for nappies to a pensioner or sending a two-for-one beer offer to a teetotaller. The ultimate use of the data was in developing a strategy, which has now been adopted by almost all major retailers aiming at the mass market. They called it ‘good, better, best’. The Tesco Value line was good; their normal Tesco-branded products were ‘better’; and in 1995 it launched Tesco Finest, its ‘best’. At the time Tesco’s marketing director said the company’s ambition was to be ‘classless … to be the natural choice of the middle market’. But by segmenting and introducing Finest the company was able to attract a whole swathe of Middleton classes, those who might feel uncomfortable upgrading to Waitrose (or who don’t have one nearby) but are keen to assert their superior status, while still keeping Asda (or Tesco) Mums happy. This segmentation can be seen at Sainsbury’s, with its Basics, By Sainsbury’s and Taste the Difference, and at Asda, with its Smart Price, Asda Chosen by You and Extra Special. But it is also a tactic used by other shops including Marks & Spencer, B&Q and Homebase. It is now standard procedure among these big chains to analyse the customer base intensely and offer them within one shop an entirely different selection of products based on their socio-economic category. This gives customers the tantalising option of ‘trading up’ as well as the face-saving option of ‘trading down’ if they are short of cash but unwilling to suffer the shame of going to a more downmarket supermarket.
You might be one of 33 million shoppers who shop each week at Tesco, but by buying Finest you are in a separate class. Upgrade to Organic and you’re home and dry.
The real battleground was our old friend the ready meal. It was here that it was easiest to segment, to ‘add value’, as the jargon went, and indeed to strip out costs. M&S pioneered the concept, but as the microwave took off during the 1980s and 90s other supermarkets were able to develop a whole range of packaged and processed meals designed for customers who were working longer hours, and had the desire for more sophisticated food, but lacked the skill or inclination to cook it themselves.
By 1994, two-thirds of households for the first time had a microwave, and the ready meal had become part of the landscape. The Kievs of this world were put in supermarkets’ ‘best’ ranges, but the supermarkets were also keen to attract working-class consumers to the booming ready meal category. Cut-price lasagnes, curries and stir-fries were developed. So, within one supermarket, Tesco, you can now buy 44p tinned Value meatballs in tomato sauce; treat yourself to a microwavable spaghetti and meatball ready meal, costing £1.87; or you can splash out on a dish of Finest classic Moroccan spiced lamb meatballs for £5.80, to be lovingly heated in the Aga. This allows shoppers to both look down on and envy the choices being made by fellow shoppers right in front of their eyes. With a supermarket ready meal, with the merest glance at the packaging one can immediately start to judge. The top-of-the-range ready meals, such as the ones promoted by Marks & Spencer as part of their recession-busting Dine in for £10 promotion, are deemed smart or even luxuriant. But the ‘good’ ranges – basic, value, budget, in their white boxes and tin foil devoid of any descriptive words – are demonised as the worst of all modern products: inauthentic, processed, and ruinous to the environment and your family’s health.
Of course, both are invariably made in the same factory by the same supplier using more or less the same ingredients. The difference lies in some flavourings, a bit more generous use of the main protein, and crucially the packaging and marketing. White space on the ready meal box is not a cost-cutting measure by the supermarket but is used as a signifier – a quick way, in the 2.3 seconds in which a customer makes up their mind to buy a product, to shout ‘cheap’. On a price-per-calorie basis, the difference is often not that enormous. And often the discount ranges are put in the freezer, in a further prompt to their low-class status.
This schizophrenia about ready meals came to a head in 2004 when Jamie Oliver’s television programme Jamie’s School Dinners led to very public soul-searching, led by the Wood Burning Stovers. A petition with 300,000 signatories was presented to Downing Street. Processed, frozen food was for ill-educated, obese parents who wanted to kill their children, or, as Jamie put it, ‘what we have learnt to call “white trash”’.
Iceland, despite a brief (and disastrous) experiment to become the only national retailer of 100 per cent organic food, has become the main lightning conductor for this hatred. One quite reputable online chat room had a forum by the title: Is Iceland Food Chav Cuisine?13 One poster said: ‘Have you seen the sort of crap they are doing now! Prawns that come on their own spoons, is that meant to be some sort of chavvy amuse bouche?’ Another was more direct: ‘I would rather lick the bottom of a tramp’s ageing sandals than be seen dead in Iceland. If the likes of Kerry Ketamine Katona and bloody Coleen Nolan are associated with the establishment it just makes me turn to trusty old Tesco (and its more civilised clientele).’
This of course was another key factor in how Iceland set itself apart from the discounters – it used a series of low-class celebrities in its adverts. First was Kerry Katona, a former member of Atomic Kitten, who later kept the flickering candle of fame alight by being a runner-up in Celebrity Big Brother and starring in a reality television show about her addiction to cocaine. Then there was Stacey Solomon, former X Factor contestant, who was vilified for being caught smoking while pregnant. These stars were aspirational, but only to the Hyphen-Leighs. The cherry on top of the frozen black forest gateau was when Iceland signed a tie-up with Greggs, which paid to install branded freezers stocked with the full range of pasties, steak bakes and sausage rolls for its customers to cook at home.
Iceland’s rock-bottom image is not something that particularly bothers the company – it helps reinforce its role as supplier of choice to a very specific demographic. In recent years it has flourished more than almost any other supermarket apart from Waitrose.
My nearest park in north London recently spent a lot of money improving the facilities. A new playground was built, the pond was dredged and the café – located inside an old house in the park – was refurbished. It appeared to have gone smoothly, but then the local paper reported: ‘Class war has erupted over Clissold Park’s newly opened café with complaints it’s too snooty and expensive and doesn’t serve up chips. Instead the caf promotes healthy living – and has the likes of cumin, roast carrot, couscous and spiced nut salad and beetroot cake on the menu.’ In a bid to win plaudits from the numerous Wood Burning Stovers in the area, the new management had alienated the equally large number of Asda Mums who used to eat there. This was not, however, just a little mischief-making in the local paper. Action groups were formed, petitions signed, rabbles roused. The leader of the movement said he objected to the café being centred around ‘the most self-conscious of the middle class’.
Twenty years after battles against McDonald’s, consumers were fighting for the right to eat chips, and against cumin. Down with Indian spices! Death to root vegetables! All these flavours and cuisines we have been exposed to over the last 60 years should have freed us from rows over restaurant menus, from being embarrassed to serve your guests something, from trying to hide products in your supermarket shopping basket. But the millions of choices in the supermarket have not wiped out the class divisions, merely reinforced them, because even the simplest decision – of what sandwich to have for your lunch, or coffee to have in the morning – is about status.
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