Go to Tesco PLC’s website and its brand purpose is there for all to see: “Serving customers a little better every day”. A strategy it has, in my adult lifetime, delivered against. Every day for everyone, in every big town and city across Britain, a ubiquitous everyman brand, one that lives that promise.

As a visual brand it’s never been more than just present. It’s a brand you can easily parody, a sure sign that everyone knows it and understands it. The imitation is flattery, the acknowledgement of a symbol well recognised.

It’s a brand that for many years was always first and had everything. From the Tesco Value range in its distinct brand colours, up to the original premium offering of Finest*, it served the whole country. With the Tesco Clubcard, it invented rewards and built the physical manifestation of brand in our pocket. All of this innovation led to a number one status it held for years, with the brand as a signifier. Tesco invented, others copied. It didn’t need to tweak the logo, because it was the market leader. Then, during the 1990s, two German brands turned up in our towns and plonked themselves gently everywhere. And at first Tesco didn’t worry, because these two brands were just cheap warehouses piled high with product, as Tesco itself had once been.

Now, I am going to confess, I am not an Lidl or Aldi shopper. The experience isn’t for me. I am not motivated by bargains and they are non-brands that just leave me cold. They’ve invested in some clever marketing, and their shop design has some smart moments, but they just don’t resonate with me. I’d rather go to a store that has everything I need in one hit.

But they do serve a mixed selection of products, many of which are seen as high value in a no-nonsense way. As a result, they have caught Tesco sleeping. This summer, as Lidl made a series of TV spots around their sponsorship of the England football team, it struck me that these were the adverts that Tesco ran, back in the late millennium golden generation days of Frank Lampard.

For years now we’ve heard rumours of Tesco rebrands that never see the light of day. Attempts at changing that logo, which was first introduced in 1995. My guess has always been the sheer number of touch points across their 6,553 stores has tempered the enthusiasm for change with a hell of a refit bill.

But with half a decade of tough trading, a retreat from the US market and a lack of innovation that’s stuck, Tesco needed something to fight back. Something to make it the everyman again, and to stop that market share slipping further. So it has invented Jack’s, a low cost version that goes right back to its roots. The average Tesco sells 35,000 lines; Jack’s will sell 3,500, with many classic brands such as Heinz missing. I am not going into the reasons behind it all, you can read the press release here and stories in the Guardian, BBC and various other media sources. I am instead going to focus on why I think Jack’s is a misstep, but an understandable one.

Tesco in the late 1980s moved away from stack-it-high and sell-it-cheap. A decision that suited the 1990s and our growing sophistication as a country. It looked forward and made a brand which in retrospect feels very New Labour. A brand for the striver, in step with the times.

To  give Jack’s a solid provenance it has dived back into the Tesco founder’s story and pulled a tenuous link about the original intent, rebadged for the nostalgia generation. The name is solid, but the overall result is the Keep Calm & Carry On of supermarkets. It’s a fetishisation of a world that never really existed for most customers, and which definitely didn’t exist for the middle-class Lidl smoked salmon chasers.

It’s bad enough that Brexit has dominated every news cycle for the last three years. It’s now birthing low-cost austerity-themed supermarkets

I’d hazard it is really called Jack’s for another reason. The one store the media has shown seems to be absolutely covered in Union Jacks. It’s bad enough that Brexit has dominated every news cycle for the last three years. It’s now birthing low-cost austerity-themed supermarkets. The walls shout about how British the milk is. Everything is red, white and blue; every shelf edge label, every bag. All delivered in an up-and-to-the-right type style that says, ‘We will be OK’. Any brand’s culture drives its values, but in this case they have attempted to turn a country’s culture into the brand’s values and to me, it feels so odd. Tesco isn’t on its own here. Recently Vauxhall has doubled down on its “Buy British” advertising.

Looking at a forensic level, there’s a few key elements that drive the meaning in this brand. A logo that comes from market stall, marker-pen pricing of old. Designed to ring those semiotic bells in a way that harks back to a romantic idea of a greengrocer that most people of a certain age have never seen, let alone shopped in. It’s handwritten, authentic and – that most over-used of brand values – human. I can see the deck now, a honest signature for a country fed up with experts.

The colours are exactly the same as Tesco, except for a light blue that appears now and again, but their volume is off. Where Tesco has always used white as a confident bag background, these bags clash red against blue in a way that feels loud and unnecessary. The bold, jaunty logo particularly comes unstuck on the products themselves. For example, the tea packaging leaves no doubt as to who the boss is, it’s Britain, I mean, Jack’s.

All these elements together create a store that looks and feels like Wilko, B&M or Iceland. It’s pure discount delivered into Leave voting constituencies, in mothballed branches of Tesco, by a brand trying to be too clever.

For me the biggest mistake in all this is that Tesco has moved away from its past playbook of innovation and future-looking. It’s not its fault though, the whole country is doing it and Tesco has been swept along for the ride. As a country we’re starting to doubt who we are, so we’re going back to the past to try and work out where it all went wrong. It’s Corbyn and his idea of 1970’s manufacturing and nationalised services. It’s the Daily Mail and its return to post-war British values. Jack’s is a fake version of the past, an austerity misstep and the greatest irony is, the two enemies Tesco thinks it is fighting are both German brands, outwitting it by delivering a true European supermarket experience.

James Greenfield is a regular CR columnist and the Founder and Creative Director of design and branding studio Koto