ARTS: PETER YORK ON ADS: When all a woman wants is a quickie
No 210: SOMERFIELD
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Your support makes all the difference."AND ANOTHER thing," says the Somerfield Woman - she talks like that, as if you'd been chatting ever since her last commercial. "Because Somerfield isn't the size of a small county, you can nip in, get all your bits, then nip out."
This is what's called making the best of things. Somerfield doesn't have gigantic comprehensive stores like the middle-class supermarkets, Tesco and Sainsbury; it isn't special, like M&S, and it isn't as sharply priced as discounters like Kwiksave. Hence Somerfield Woman: the basis for a brand-personality approach which helps viewers to identify the Somerfield shopper as a grown-up, rounded, pragmatic, appealing sort of woman, and which gives existing Somerfield shoppers a positive rationalisation to continue going there.
Casting, set design and language are all nicely observed in a low-key way. The casting is crucial. The brief must've said "mature", "attractive", "quietly confident" and "natural". A Woman of Today. Absolutely not Weather Barbie, Killer Yuppie or mousewife. It would've continued "independent- minded" (from within the context of a stable married relationship, of course), capable of taking home-making in her stride.
And they've got her. She's implacable without seeming bland: an unforced, nice, evolved bit of New Middle England. And she carries off that old device, talking to camera as if to a friend while doing stuff in the kitchen, with conviction. The kitchen itself is well observed, understated and believable. The dialogue shows, I would say, that Somerfield has been listening carefully to the research, and especially to the rhythms of real speech.
It's clever too to have Somerfield Woman say, "After all, I've got far better things to do than spend all day shopping for food," as there's not the remotest danger of that happening in Somerfield. And the way she arranges pork chops on the grill- pan really is a minor masterpiece.
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