A nice new campaign from Waitrose – but beware looking too much like M&S

Waitrose (or Waitrose & Partners as we’re now supposed to call it) has taken a leaf out of M&S’s old food book (and the Wieden+Kennedy manual) with what we used to call food porn, coupled with some nice free range outdoor shots in its latest effort from adam&eveDDB.

Trying to read the runes at John Lewis Partnership, which owns Waitrose and which is undergoing a major upheaval is a pretty impossible task. The Partnership (it’s a mutual) has combined the managements of John Lewis department stores (struggling) with supermarket Waitrose (just about keeping its end up) for no apparent reason other than to save money.

It leaves John Lewis Partnership looking rather like M&S, which has a centralised management for clothing and food. Given M&S’s ongoing travails that doesn’t seem a very good look.

So this campaign is probably a holding operation, accomplished with A&E’s usual poise.

MAA creative scale: 7.