Mr Bean Cooks Up a Winner for Migros and Frey

One of the most surprising and talked-about European ads of 2025 so far comes from Supermarket chain Migros, advertising their Frey chocolate brand in Switzerland. Surprising because it’s very unusual for a supermarket to advertise its own-brand products at all, let alone go to the lengths of hiring Rowan Atkinson of Mr Bean fame to do it. And talked-about because Atkinson does such a great job of making an entertaining ad for Migros and Frey.

The ad casts Rowan Atkinson as a chocolate maker in a white chef’s hat. It’s a look that made at least one of our Test Your Ad respondents think of Lindt’s famous “Master Chocolatier” fluent device. The resemblance to the competitor brand is almost certainly intentional. Lindt are the market leading brand and they have a large collection of 5-Star ads to prove it, so this cheeky reference is an acknowledgement of their dominance – and the fame of their iconic chocolatier!

But it’s also making a point about Frey’s own position. In the ad, Atkinson’s Mr Bean style chocolate maker tries his best to make fancy chocolate but in classic comedy style he gets it wrong every time. In the end, he just makes a plain, delicious slab of milk chocolate and to be wrapped in the Frey packaging.

The message is a simple one. Let the big brands make the premium stuff, and let Frey get on with what it knows best, making great chocolate at an own-brand price. The tagline says it all: Chocolate without ‘trallala’, meaning chocolate without the fuss.

It’s a good positioning for an own-label brand, which is never going to credibly compete with big chocolate brands in their premium territory. The ad acknowledges this, while also stressing that Frey too make their products with care. In fact, hiring a well-known comedian like Rowan Atkinson reinforces this point in a subtle way. It’s an example of costly signaling: the expense of getting such a big name for your ads makes Migros and Frey feel more trustworthy and high-quality even if their product isn’t expensive.

The use of Rowan Atkinson playing a very Mr Bean like character is what we call a ‘Hired Device’ as distinct from the brand-owned ‘Fluent Device’. The risk of a Hired Device is that the ads can end up being more focused on the character than the brand. But “Migros” and “Chocolate” still come top of the key associations table here, so Frey seem to have avoided that risk.

Meanwhile Atkinson’s performance delivers an exceptional result for Frey and Migros in terms of long-term effectiveness, with a 5.4-Star Rating, miles ahead of the 2.6-Star average for Swiss TV ads. Chocolate is a very popular sector with audiences, but this result is in the same ballpark as the best ads from Frey’s name brand competitors.

Should more supermarkets follow Migros’ lead and use top-tier talent in ads for own-label products? It’s an unusual strategy, but by focusing on a very popular category and using humor and parody to make a strong marketing point, Migros and Frey have shown there’s a real benefit to doing it if you do it the right way.