Choosing Ready Salted Chipsticks and Still Losing Ready Salted Chipsticks

Well it’s about time to have another rant at the owner of Ready Salted Chipsticks, Walkers Crisps.

I’ve mentioned before that their marketing strategy is obfuscated*, and that they are appalling at responding to customer feedback. These two factors have not stopped them from launching two wholly awful campaigns.

Campaign #1

This was around October 2015, and the tag line was: 

“Your old favourites are back! Vote for one to stay…”, whereupon they advertised that the Beef and Onion, Cheese and Chive, Barbecue (at least spelt correctly), Toasted Cheese, and Lamb and Mint flavours were back for a limited time, and that you have the chance to vote for one of them to stay permanently. It also advised that you could vote as many times as you wanted, so presumably this could be one hundred times for one flavour or once for each flavour. Now, as Beef and Onion are still in production I assume that this flavour won the “competition”.

At the time (which was a year before I started this blog) this was a slap in the face for someone who was pestering them weekly for the return of Ready Salted Chipsticks. Especially as they headed their communications:

“You’ve asked and we’ve listened”

That was a bare faced lie. If you had listened to me (and I know I have voted multiple times from Ready Salted Chipsticks) they would have been in your returned crisp list, not sodding lamb and mint. Ew, and I mean that with all sincerity, and with all my heart, ew.

Walkers – you failed.

Campaign #2

This week has seen the launch of “Choose Them or Lose Them” where they have pitched some traditional favourites against some really left field flavours to get the public to decide which ones to keep. Therefore at the end of this “competition” we will either have:

• ·        One of Smokey Bacon or Bacon and Cheddar
• ·        One of Salt and Vinegar or Lime and Black Pepper (this one deserves an “ew” as well. I mean seriously, is there even a competition in this one?!)
• ·        And one of Prawn Cocktail or Paprika

I feel for those poor random flavours, as they are not going to stand up to the traditional and well-loved standard ones. I’m also really intrigued as to what actions walkers will take from these. Will they indeed reduce their varied portfolio of flavours by three?

Both of these campaigns have led me to be critical of the approach that Walkers take to how they choose what should be in their product range.

For campaign #1 there could have been 100 people asking once for Cheese and Chive to be kept and 1 person asking 101 times for Beef and Onion.

For campaign #2 there is no rationale behind why they selected those particular flavours and what on earth are they going to do if in some strange voting glitch, where one can only assume that Russia had a hand in the fixing of results, that Lime and Black Pepper beat Salt and Vinegar?! Get rid of one of their top tier flavours I doubt it.

So, we know that their voting system is flawed, and that it doesn’t matter anyway as the voting is fixed or at the very least pre-determined by their sales figures.

It’s all a massive marketing bluff, and the sad fact is that it will work. The even sadder fact is that they didn’t even attempt anything similar with Ready Salted Chipsticks to help boost their sales, which they still state were low enough to discontinue them, but cannot provide the statistics to back this statement up. They didn’t try, don’t listen, and will get away with this as no-one really knows it’s Walkers and not Smiths who are driving the decisions.

Kudos Walkers – you have now reached bond villain level in my mind as you sit there laughing at our misfortune, counting your precious pennies, and trying to figure out how best to destroy our soul next.

*This is one of my favourite words, as it is what it means. I do have a tendency to use this ironically and forget it’s a bit of a knobby word.