‘I spent my first 18 months there firefighting,’ remembers Paul Stainton. ‘They were trying to stop us in our tracks.’ After responding to an advert in the local paper, Stainton got a job as a buyer at Aldi in 1989 – a year before the supermarket opened its first store in the UK. When Aldi’s super-low prices started making headlines, the British supermarket establishment threw a hissy fit. ‘The likes of Tesco and Sainsbury’s were going to our suppliers and threatening them,’ Stainton says. ‘They were basically saying: “If you carry on supplying Aldi, then we’ll delist your products.”’
The Tony Soprano schtick eventually stopped working, and four years later, another German-owned supermarket – Lidl – joined Aldi in the UK. In a field of British competitors, there was an air of exoticism and suspicion surrounding them. And they weren’t just foreign, but German, so rumours quickly began to swirl that Aldi and Lidl were the same company, shadily trading under slightly different names to circumvent rules about how many branches of the same supermarket were allowed in different areas. Or that they were owned by a pair of brothers who had fallen out and become bitter rivals.
As a young man fresh out of a graduate scheme, Stainton says that working at Aldi initially felt like a start-up, where no two days, or hours, were the same. ‘I remember doing quite an in-depth negotiation on baked beans with our supplier,’ Stainton says. ‘The next conversation was with a TV supplier. I literally put the phone down after talking about thousands of cans of baked beans, then started talking about 14-inch TVs. Remember 14-inch TVs?’
Much like the size of our TV screens, Aldi and Lidl have since grown hugely. As industry disruptors, part of their success has been creating their own versions of existing products, which have been shamelessly designed to look and taste like their branded counterparts. Back in 2008, about three or four recessions ago, Aldi first had a spike in sales when the credit crunch hit. To capitalise on this, Stainton remembers that one of their main goals was to make the German-owned business ‘feel’ like a British supermarket. They also expanded their product offering, to allow British shoppers to do ‘the big shop’ there, rather than popping in ‘for a few bits and bobs’.
Own-brand products that were purposefully designed to be familiar were central to this plan. ‘If you take tomato ketchup, for example. Aldi would make as much effort to make their one taste as good as Heinz,’ Stainton says. ‘To help their customer understand that the product was an equivalent, they would take cues from the Heinz packaging and do something similar.’ Aldi began heavily promoting these products in ad campaigns, such as 2012’s ‘Like brands, only cheaper’. In these ads, shoppers would choose between market leaders like PG Tips tea and the own-brand alternative. ‘It really worked,’ Stainton remembers, ‘because we all love a bargain.’
Alex Bee, product director at Space Doctors – a branding agency that works with Ocado and Tesco – tells me that she has recently seen an uptick in client briefs seeking imitations of existing products. ‘Brands have always copied other brands, but the biggest thing that’s changed is cultural attitudes towards value-range products,’ she says. Britain’s national obsession with classist microaggressions appears to be shifting – when it comes to food, at least. ‘People are choosing own-label products because they are no longer perceived as low-quality,’ Bee says. ‘Now, culturally, the perception is that it’s actually quite smart, bordering on smug.’
Aldi’s ‘middle aisle’ – a place where everything from air fryers to hiking gear can be snapped up – has been part of breaking down this stigma. Stainton remembers that the concept originated in their German stores as a way of using products like DIY materials to get ‘different types’ of customers (translation: men) into their stores. In the UK, there were two lightning-rod moments: first, when ski-wear appeared in the middle aisle, luring in the middle classes with the promise of Alpine-appropriate gear at a fraction of the price. Then there was an inflatable hot tub, which is still one of the most expensive items they have ever sold. ‘It was about 300 quid,’ Stainton says. ‘But it got loads of PR because it was so unusual and eccentric. Everyone was talking about it.’
Brands who find themselves being imitated by Aldi or Lidl have every reason to feel pissed off about it, but these dupes have a symbiotic relationship with the brands they’re imitating. It might seem like customers are rejecting them, but they’re only choosing these copycat versions because they feel like the original. To be copied by Aldi or Lidl is to be a victim of your own success. But what happens when brands don’t see imitation as a form of flattery?
