January 26, 2021 Reanne Duffy

Andover based BP Rolls used Metamark MD5-A to deliver a rather special livery to Ocado…

The long-awaited partnership between one of Britain’s best known retailers, Marks and Spencer, and Ocado, officially began on 1st September 2020 when the first deliveries to customers were made. M&S has made its entire food and drink range available for delivery through Ocado. The new partnership saw Ocado part ways with Waitrose after eighteen years and was marked by M&S spending some £750M for a 50% stake in Ocado’s retail business.

Anyone with doubts that the new relationship had come to pass would have had these addressed by Ocado’s ten rather conspicuous delivery vehicles among its fleet. The vehicles in question are what the sign and allied industry has come to know as ‘head turners’ being just about the pinkest things on wheels on British roads.

They featured, or should that be ’starred,’ M&S’s much loved confectionary item, the Percy Pig, and reportedly received the attention that was anticipated and produced some impressive sales. The text on the vehicles also invited anyone who saw them to take a #PercyPic and share it through social networks. Many did, enticed by the possibility of winning £200 to spend at Ocado.

The job of providing and fitting the eye-popping wrap to the Ocado fleet fell to Andover based BP Rolls. BP Rolls is no stranger to the needs of keeping major fleets on the road, looking good, and appropriately branded. The company extends its body repair and graphics service to some of the country’s biggest brands and largest fleet populations. The scale at which BP Rolls operates makes it as big a force in logistics and project management as it is mainly involved in graphics. The fact that big brands can count on correctly branded vehicles being available where and when needed is down to BP Rolls and its competencies.

The Percy Pig livery was printed on Metamark MD5-A protected with a UV laminate. With ‘Percy Pink’ being such an obvious feature of the wrap and the campaign it supported, colour fidelity was an important part of BP Rolls’ client’s technical requirement. It looked spot-on and it stayed that way for the duration of the promotion. Clean removal is a feature of all Metamark digital media and so Percy vanished without a trace when the promotion ended.

Promotional vehicle livery is a very potent medium that helps brands achieve greater leverage from the much larger investments made in broadcast promotion and branding in a more general sense. Liveries are known to represent one of the most effective means of identity continuation, and are said to drive impressive recall of seasonal promotions too. 

Delivering at scale is a competence that both Ocado and BP Rolls can claim and that few can challenge.