What's your line?

When I was a very little girl, we had a Sainsbury's in the High St. I still remember clearly the decoration and tiling and the store interior, a broad corridor with counters at either side where shop assistants would carve ham, cut cheese with wire or simply hand you a packet of Sainbury's own brand cornflakes.

A few years later, Sainbury's opened a supermarket in the new town centre. I recall the simple but striking graphics of their own label range - from the cola to the golden syrup.

It's interesting to see that Sainbury's have changed their endline from "Try something new today" to "Live well for less". To put that in context, I have pinched a list of Sainsbury endlines from this article.

SAINSBURY'S SLOGANS

1882: Quality perfect, prices lower
1918: Sainsbury's for quality, Sainsbury's for value
1945: It's clean, it's fresh at Sainsbury's
1959: Good food costs less at Sainsbury's
1991: Sainsbury's - everyone's favourite ingredient
1997: Fresh food, fresh ideas
1998: Value to shout about
1999: Making life taste better
2005: Try something new today
2011: Live well for less

It's amazing to think that the endline that is most familiar to me was knocking around for 32 years. And I think that the reason for its longevity was that it's more than an advertising endline, tagline or jingle. It is more a statement of what the brand is about - a brand slogan, if you like, than simply a neat summary line of the advertising campaign.

I'm a bit sorry to see the "try something new today" line being ushered out so quickly. As I understood it, this was more than a catchline for the advertising - it's actually a positioning for Sainsbury's which is based on a clear commercial strategy of increasing the average spend per shop, and casts Sainsbury's in the role of the shop where you find interesting and inspiring new ideas - more competitive, I would have thought, than yet another creative iteration of the value equation.

Or maybe the ad agency just decided to act out their own slogan.