NEWS: Flanagan set to deliver growth

Home-shopping company Flanagan & Co is to launch its first marketing

offensive next year, as it extends its service across London and into

other UK cities.

The company has appointed K Advertising to conduct a strategic brand

review followed by an advertising campaign set for March next year, when

it will expand beyond south London to cover the capital as far north as

Hampstead.

Fellow Cordiant shop The Rowland Company has been appointed to handle

Flanagan & Co’s public relations activity.

Flanagan & Co shares information about its telephone shopping operations

with Sainsbury’s, which supplies the company with 70% of its products.

The supermarket chain currently has no financial ties to Flanagan & Co

but is known to be keen to enter the UK home-shopping market under its

own brand, following the launch of home-shopping trials by Tesco and

Marks & Spencer.

Joint chief executive of Flanagan & Co, Dominick Scott-Flanagan, said

the company never intended to be a small operation and had spent the

time since its launch, in January 1995, getting the service right before

a national roll-out.

‘We hope to have the whole of the London market within the next 24

months,’ he said.

‘If Tesco and Sainsbury’s could open up to 20 superstores a year during

the 80s, we can open 20 of our depots.’

Hamish Pringle, chairman and chief executive officer of K Advertising,

said the home-supply market had great potential.

‘It is quite ironic because a few years ago everything was delivered to

the door, and now everyone is piling back into it. Home shopping is

really going to explode,’ he said.

According to a recent report by Andersen Consulting, the market for

ordering groceries over the phone will account for 5% of all shopping by

the end of the century and 20% by 2010.

This article was first published on Marketing