Odd borrowings

I had the enormous privilege of watching this ad the other day:

Unfortunately, it didn’t make me want to shop at Littlewoods, but it did make me wonder why that big national chain that sells lots of different homeware and clothes has used the very well known face of another big national chain that sells lots of different homeware and clothes.

(This one’s from waaaaay back in 2012):

So I think that’s a bit odd or lazy. When people see Myleene Klass, who has advertised M&S for several years, I’d have thought many of them just think ‘M&S’ and go back to doing what they were doing before the ad came on, which must be a bit of an own goal for Littlewoods. They have surely paid many thousands of pounds to have Ms Klass’s melted-shoe face adorning their generic Christmas messaging, so why spunk so many of those notes up the wall?

Even odder, though: when I Tweeted this oddness, someone sent me this link to show that Asda is now using Sainsbury’s famous old endline, Good food costs less at Sainsbury’s/Asda. Obviously, both are among the most prominent grocers in the country, so that’s quite similar territory, isn’t it?

Then again, Sainsbury’s haven’t used the line for at least ten years, but it was invented by Lord James Sainsbury in 1959, and it was declared retailing’s ‘best-known advertising and marketing slogan’.

But what I don’t understand is that there must be at least ten other bints who could do Myleene’s job without difficulty, just as there must be millions of other combinations of words that express the high quality and low price of food.

So why use the very famous property associated with one of your biggest rivals?