Primark preps home delivery and says it is redefining value

Primark, the last great holdout of shop-only retail, is going online. Announcing fourth-quarter results on 10 September, Associated British Foods chief executive George Weston confirmed the retailer will launch home delivery, four years after it first allowed click and collect, and has signed a £90m deal to buy a warehouse from Boohoo to run it.

Weston framed the move to investors as “a profitable channel for growth that complements” stores rather than replacing them, and credited the digital marketing capability Primark has built since click and collect began. The immediate numbers are less comfortable. Like-for-like sales fell 3 per cent in the quarter, blamed partly on the hot summer, though ABF still expects around 2 per cent growth for the full year, as reported by Marketing Week.

The advertising story sits underneath. Weston singled out Iconic Value, the campaign Primark launched in July to pair lower prices with a claim about quality and style, calling it a strategic investment with an “encouraging” early effect on volumes. Marketing spend is up, and the line the business keeps repeating is that Primark is “redefining value”, not just through price but through product and the store experience.

For twenty years Primark’s marketing model was the absence of one: no ecommerce, minimal advertising, queues doing the work of media. That model is being dismantled piece by piece, and a delivery service gives the brand a reason to advertise like a normal retailer, because it finally has somewhere to send people other than the high street.

It lands in a week when British retail’s two biggest marketing stories point the same direction. John Lewis is raising brand investment through widening losses, and ABF has just put £4m behind relaunching Hovis, its other new acquisition. The cheapest operator on the high street and the poshest one have reached the same conclusion: the next phase gets won with brand, not just shelves.