Tesco US: Corporate comms slip or masterstroke?
Image by frazgo via FlickrSo, I part caught the news that Tesco had decided to take a breather in the US and not open any stores for the next three months.
What I’d missed was that the story actually came from a post more than a week earlier on their marketing man, Simon Unwin’s blog titled: “Pausing for a breath at fresh and easy”
The share price fell as a result of the news - as Julia Finch pointed out in the Guardian yesterday (you have to scroll down a bit to find this bit)
The shares dropped 11.25p to 379p, and traders blamed Uwins’ blog. The marketing man has been blogging about Tesco’s Fresh & Easy convenience stores for nearly a year now, keeping anyone sad enough to follow such things up to date with the grocer’s American adventure.
And concluding
We shall have to pay more attention to Uwins. That means analysts and dealers too. Yesterday’s share price reaction was to last Wednesday’s blog - the delayed reaction was because no one had noticed.
Anyway - either a bit of a blunder letting out share price sensitive news on a blog like that, or, errrr, a bit of a masterstroke letting out share price sensitive news on a blog like that. Especially when some analysts were already jumpy about performance in the US
I hear the sound of analysts scrabbling to discover blogs written by staff of the companies they cover as I type.
Simon @ April 2, 2008
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