I'm a big fan of Waitrose and a customer for nearly 30 years. I'm also a genuine admirer of Kitcatt Nohr, one of the best agencies in London. So there was a double sense of disappointment when I received the new Waitrose essentials mailing fanfared in Marketing Direct yesterday.

To start with, I fear that it was one of those jobs where the format came first and the creative was then shoehorned to fit. Why else, for a concept focusing on 'the week', would you have Monday and Tuesday on one side and the rest of the week on the other? Oh, and I never understand why brands feature illustrations of fresh food when good photography is so much more effective.

There are more important flaws. If you are going to suggest meals, then please give the recipes. That means the ingredients and how to cook it. Saying "you can find the recipe for this delicious meal in store" is just annoying and people won't remember to do it. Besides, if you give the full recipe you encourage the shopper to buy all the necessary items on their next trip.

Worse than that, having taken up 7 panels with suggested daily meals, only 2 panels remain to feature no less than 56 essentials products! They are therefore reproduced so small, you have little idea what many of them are. I genuinely struggled to identify the product in column 1 row 3 on the Monday side. Or column 2 row 4 etc etc. If you can't easily recognise the packaging and labelling of a range, the whole point of the pack is lost. A more conventional format could have allowed sufficient space.

Through years of working on Nectar, Sainsbury's, Persil, PG Tips and many other Lever brands I confess to being a coupon junkie. But I thought everyone knew that in retail you stagger coupon validity dates to encourage repetitive behaviour? What Waitrose has done is basically given me £4 off my next shop. That's not quite the behaviour they want to encourage.

They should be offering more than 4 coupons. Better to do 8 x 50p coupons than 4 x £1. It looks a better deal. You should then allocate half those 50p coupons to specific essentials products. That way, Waitrose oven chips (for instance) are no longer £1.25p but a massively compelling 75p! A few 'allocated coupons' will do more to promote the range and the value concept. Net coupon value often makes little difference. Shoppers either use coupons or they don't. Always worth testing though.

I hope this campaign works well because I admire both organisations involved. It just could have been a lot smarter. Doubtless it will win an award.