Tesco’s 2021 Christmas campaign was the tricky ‘second album’ to the hugely successful performance of ‘No Naughty List’ in 2020.

And to make matters worse, the context within which we were operating had become much more difficult for the following reasons:

1. Unlike 2020, when Tesco had benefited in lockdown from people being forced to do one ‘big shop’, customers would be able to revert to pre-pandemic shopping behaviours — splitting their shopping between different supermarkets.
2. As the pandemic wore on, customers no longer had one, universally shared experience of Covid. This made it even harder to predict when we were briefed in March as to what messages would appeal at Christmas.

So, to beat our performance from the year before, while facing these headwinds, our strategy had to be brave.

Rather than ignoring reality and developing a campaign that was agnostic of this context, we decided to run headlong into the uncertainty.

To do this:

1. We identified, and then made the core of our campaign, the one certain thing that wouldn’t change...