Can Allan Leighton’s price push roll back the years for Asda?

Asda’s bid to roll back to the good times began in earnest this week, as executive chairman Allan Leighton launched a two-year programme of price cuts. With that, he promised to win back the hard-working families that have deserted the supermarket in their droves.

In came an initial 4,000 price cuts, and a heavyweight marketing campaign fronted by Joe Wicks declaring ‘Rollback is back’, compete with a return of the famous pocket tap.

Out, as The Grocer exclusively revealed earlier this week, went its price match campaign against Aldi and Lidl – hailed by Asda as agenda-setting only a year ago.

But do Leighton and Asda’s owners TDR Capital have the deep pockets to allow them to reclaim Asda’s traditional price crown? Or will they have their backsides kicked, rather than patted, by the opposition?

Asda claimed the ignominious title of the worst-performing supermarket over the Christmas period, in a culmination of the continued pressure from the discounters and traditional supermarket rivals.

So Asda started 2025 with a bang, announcing a ‘Big Jan Price Drop’ campaign. Less than a month later, the new Rollback programme is set to dwarf those price cuts.

Every category in the store is to be included, as well as Asda Express stores, with a promotional cycle of 12 weeks before products move to a new permanent Asda price.

The promotional prices will be at least 5% lower than those of all competitor full-range supermarkets, it claims.

“This is Asda getting back to Asda’s DNA,” says chief customer officer David Hills, who joined from Aldi in September 2023. “Our marketing campaign is very much centred around ‘Rollback is back’, which is a message we know resonates very well with customers.”

The phrase ‘working families’ is used machine gun-style by Hills as he tells The Grocer of Asda’s plans, but the soundbite does not explain why it ditched Aldi and Lidl price matches.

Asda may have joined the show late – the Tesco and Sainsbury’s schemes were already well established – but it was the first to target Lidl as well as Aldi in January last year. Hills told The Grocer at the time it was “recapturing Asda’s heritage as a consumer champion”.

Now he says Rollback – and the commitment to lowering prices in the long term – is a better way of “focusing on our customers, the Asda customer, that hard-working family”.

“We want to talk about Asda price, we don’t want to refer to others in the market.

“We know how to do it well and we need to do it consistently, backed by new Asda price, and we believe that will bring us back to our customers.”

The phrase ‘Rollback’s back’ – repeated several times in the 60-second ad, which marks Asda’s 60th year – is an example of a new “simplicity” of ­message, Hills says.

Asda has unveiled numerous price cut campaigns in recent years – a £100m push was announced in 2020 by then CEO Roger Burnley under Walmart – so there is no new science in the methods. But this time Asda is “deliberately” not putting a price on it, other than to say the campaign is “a long-term commitment”, says Hills.

Aldi responded by posting a screenshot on social media of Asda’s price match web page, which as of this week says the scheme has finished. “POV: You get dumped over text,” Aldi’s social media team wrote in a fun-poking post.

Big enough pockets?

Regardless of the message, experts say the big question is whether Asda has the firepower to match its ambitions.

“I totally believe it’s the right thing for Asda to own what is unique and special for Asda, whether that is the pocket tap, Asda price, the whole works,” says Catherine Shuttleworth, CEO of Savvy Marketing. “If they believe they own Rollback, then fair enough, although everybody has copied that.

“Asda are at their best when they worry about Asda rather than the competition.

“Everybody in the food industry wants Asda to be strong and there is a lot of goodwill. My question is, how are they going to afford it?”

Suppliers are unlikely to be the answer to that question. “It is going to be very difficult for Asda to leverage brands to pay for any of this because of its recent performance,” Shuttleworth argues.

So for her, there is a question mark over whether “their pockets be big enough” to move the dial against Tesco and the discounters.

“The world has changed and so has the competitive set that Asda is up against. Driving volume will be vital but will also take time and I think two years is a reasonable window.

“This is a positive first step, but for now that’s all.”

Read more:

• Asda vows to be ‘cheapest’ as it brings back Rollback prices

• Asda ends its Aldi and Lidl price match scheme

• Asda boss Allan Leighton to launch massive new Rollback price war

• Asda cheapest in Grocer 33 and that’s before renewed Rollback

Ged Futter, founder of The Retail Mind, agrees with the principle of ditching the price matching scheme. “As long as they had price match, it meant Aldi and Lidl had control over their pricing,” he says.

“When I was at Asda, the goal was never to be cheaper than Aldi. It was to be 5%-10% cheaper than Tesco and that’s what they need to do again.

For him, Asda needs to get rid of unnecessary distractions and concentrate on the core challenges in the market. So he believes Asda should go further by ditching its Asda Rewards loyalty card, launched in 2022 with Wicks at the helm.

“For me, getting rid of the loyalty card sounds like the right thing to do.

“If you’re not going to have a loyalty card that competes with Tesco and Sainsbury’s, why have anything at all?”

Asda insists it has no intention of getting rid of Asda Rewards, and says the scheme remains an important part of its value proposition.

As part of Rollback, it will look to provide Rewards customers with additional ways to save via personalised offers and tailored rewards, it says, as Leighton’s turnaround moves through the gears.

Shore Capital analyst Clive Black is encouraged. He calls the Rollback programme a “significant and necessary moment of Leighton Part II” – but also points out the magnitude of its share loss makes it a very hard turnaround.

“Asda’s challenges are not just about price, it has much broader work to do to grow share,” says Black.

“Leighton is bringing necessary change, but given its sustained and material loss of volume share in recent years, we sense suppliers will be somewhat circumspect about going the whole hog with support for Rollback.

“Asda will be seeking to build overall volume momentum, which may lead to stronger external ongoing support in time,” he concludes.

The presence of several proprietary brands in the first phase of the Rollback tells its own story, says Black.

Rollback may be about more than just price, though. Asda is facing long-running issues in store standards, availability and morale. So this week, Leighton must have been encouraged to see Asda store managers proudly showing off the in-store Rollback theatre on social media.

“Wow! As we start to land our Rollback campaign and reduce loads of prices, we also see a return of the Asda Green! Pocket tap next! Great set up, great standards and fantastic availability! Thankyou team!” reads one such post.

As the Asda fightback gets going, that response is perhaps what Leighton craves most.