Aldi’s ‘price match’ complaint against Tesco dismissed by ASA

Aldi’s complaint against Tesco’s ‘price match’ campaign has been dismissed by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). 

The German grocer launched a complaint against a press ad issued by Tesco last July – which aimed to compete with Aldi.

The ad depicted a large roundel which stated “Aldi Price Match”. 

Further text below stated “Now we’ve added lots of big brands too”. Smaller text at the bottom of the page stated “Prices checked and matched on hundreds of comparable products from GB Aldi stores and/or online twice weekly”. 

However, Aldi argued that the advert failed to make the basis of the comparison clear to consumers, and challenged whether the ad was “misleading”.

The ASA said it “understood” that Aldi believed that the ad was misleading because it showed mostly branded products and did not “explicitly state” what they were being price-matched against: the same brands sold at Aldi, Aldi own-brand goods, or a mixture of both. 

In the absence of such information, Aldi believed that consumers could understand from the ad that Tesco would price match across all of Aldi’s products and that they could “obtain a large number of branded products at Aldi own-brand prices, at Tesco”. 

However, the ASA considered that the overall impression to consumers was that Tesco had added “big brands” to an existing price match scheme and “therefore that the range of products included in the scheme had expanded”. 

In combination with the image of the collection of items and the smaller text stating that “hundreds” of products were compared, it concluded that consumers would understand from the ad that “not all of Aldi’s product range was price matched in the scheme”.

The ASA said: “We reviewed the substantiation price match data and noted that all branded products in the scheme were matched against the identical product at Aldi except in one instance where Aldi did not sell the brand. 

“We considered that the ad made clear to consumers that the price match was in relation to a selection of products rather than in relation to Aldi’s entire product range, and that branded products would be matched with the same branded product where it was available at both stores. We therefore concluded that the ad was not likely to mislead.”