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Intermarche Marks 50 Years With a Romance-Crafted Love Story
Intermarche's 'C'est Magnifique' is a three-minute brand film created by Romance, directed by Katia Lewkowicz, and released in France on 24 March 2019, marking the grocery retailer's 50th anniversary through a romantic narrative set to Benjamin Biolay's interpretation of Cole Porter's classic song.
The campaign premiered on TF1 on 24 March 2019 and extended to cinema screens on 27 March 2019, according to CB News and packshotmag.com. That dual-channel release strategy — television followed almost immediately by cinema — signals a deliberate ambition to elevate the film beyond the conventions of retail advertising. At approximately three minutes, 'C'est Magnifique' occupies a duration more commonly associated with short-form cinema than with supermarket brand communication, a creative bet that Romance and Intermarche had made before with measurable success in the French market.
In France, the campaign sits within a broader repositioning platform that Romance initiated for Intermarche in March 2017, as reported by CB News. That platform is anchored in the positioning of 'Mieux manger' — eating better — which connects the retailer's supply-chain identity as 'Producteurs and Commerçants' to a consumer aspiration that transcends price. The 50th anniversary of Intermarche, which traces its origins to 1969 and adopted its current name in 1973 according to marieclaire.fr and En Wikipedia, provided a natural occasion to deepen that emotional register. The film does not argue for value or convenience; it argues for life, memory, and the role a neighbourhood grocer plays across generations. Clapboard scores this campaign 63 out of 100, reflecting strong creative ambition and cultural resonance against a backdrop of limited publicly verified performance data.
Intermarche occupies a structurally competitive position in French grocery retail. The brand held approximately 14.3% of French grocery market share in 2017, rising to approximately 14.7% on a rolling annual basis in 2019, according to lsa-conso.fr. During the June to July 2019 measurement window, lsa-conso.fr reported Intermarche reaching 15.0% market share, up 0.3 percentage points year over year — a modest but directionally consistent gain across the period in which the Romance-led emotional platform was active.
That growth occurred in a market dominated by E.Leclerc, which held 21.4% of French grocery market share in June and July 2019, and Carrefour, which held 20.5% during the same period, both figures according to lsa-conso.fr. Against those scale players, Intermarche's strategic response is not to compete on assortment breadth or price alone but to claim an emotional territory that larger rivals have historically underinvested in. Romance's platform makes the case that a retailer born from French agricultural roots, producing and selling its own goods, has a story worth telling — and that the story is most powerfully told through the idiom of French romance.
Vincent Bronsard, Intermarche's strategic and operational marketing lead, articulated the anniversary rationale directly, as quoted by CB News on 24 March 2019: the 50th year was the ideal occasion to portray a generation that grew up alongside the brand. That framing transforms the campaign from a commercial into a cultural acknowledgement — positioning Intermarche not as a store but as a shared national memory. In France, where emotional advertising has a particularly strong critical tradition, that positioning carries both sentimental and competitive weight.
Director Katia Lewkowicz shapes 'C'est Magnifique' as a genuinely cinematic piece of retail communication. The film runs approximately three minutes, a duration that production company Grand Bazar and creative agency Romance committed to despite the significant logistical and budgetary demands that length imposes on a single television and cinema advertisement in the French market.
The narrative structure is built around a romantic encounter observed across time — a storytelling device that maps directly onto Intermarche's anniversary premise while giving Lewkowicz the space to develop character, atmosphere, and emotional payoff that a standard thirty-second format cannot accommodate. The choice to score the film with Benjamin Biolay's version of 'C'est Magnifique,' originally composed by Cole Porter, layers French cultural specificity onto an internationally recognised standard, according to CB News and adsoftheworld.com. Biolay's interpretation brings a contemporary melancholy that separates the film from the straightforwardly nostalgic tone a more literal anniversary film might have adopted.
Alexandre Hervé, Creative Director at Romance, described the creative process to CB News on 24 March 2019 as a six-month effort involving dozens of abandoned scripts before the team committed to the particular story the final film tells. That admission of process — of difficulty and discernment — is itself revealing: the film's emotional coherence is not accidental but the product of sustained editorial discipline. As also reported by packshotmag.com, Hervé framed the challenge as one of renewing emotional impact with each successive film in the platform, a standard that demands creative reinvention rather than formula repetition. The film's preceding chapter, 'L'amour, l'amour,' won the Grand Prix Effie in 2018, according to CB News, which contextualises the creative pressure that 'C'est Magnifique' was built to answer.
No verified campaign-level performance data for 'C'est Magnifique' — such as recall scores, brand-preference shifts, or attributable sales uplift — is publicly available for the March 2019 film specifically. What the public record does document is directional market movement consistent with the broader Romance platform of which this film is a part.
Intermarche's French grocery market share rose from approximately 14.3% in 2017 to approximately 15.0% in mid-2019, according to lsa-conso.fr, across the same period that Romance's emotional repositioning was active. A separate 2019 consumer-panel report cited by CB News placed share at 13.8%, also up 0.3 percentage points, with the difference reflecting methodology rather than contradicting the directional trend. Neither figure can be attributed solely to 'C'est Magnifique,' but together they support the case that sustained emotional brand investment correlates with share stability in a French market where E.Leclerc and Carrefour hold structurally larger positions.
The film's predecessor in the Romance platform, 'L'amour, l'amour,' won the Grand Prix Effie in France in 2018, according to CB News — the most direct available signal that the platform's creative approach generates commercially validated outcomes. 'C'est Magnifique,' released the following year, inherits that creative legacy while extending the narrative ambition into a 50th-anniversary context. Structurally, the decision to distribute the film through both TF1 and cinema, as reported by CB News and packshotmag.com, expands reach beyond standard retail media buying and positions the brand in an environment associated with cultural significance rather than promotional urgency. That structural choice alone distinguishes the campaign from standard French retail advertising practice.
'C'est Magnifique' is a three-minute brand film created by Romance for Intermarche and released in France on 24 March 2019. Directed by Katia Lewkowicz and scored with Benjamin Biolay's version of Cole Porter's song, the film marked Intermarche's 50th anniversary through a romantic narrative, premiering on TF1 before a cinema release on 27 March 2019.
Katia Lewkowicz directed 'C'est Magnifique' for Intermarche. Lewkowicz worked with production company Grand Bazar and creative agency Romance on the project. According to CB News, Creative Director Alexandre Hervé at Romance described the campaign as the result of six months of work and dozens of abandoned scripts before the final story was chosen.
Romance built the campaign around Intermarche's 50th anniversary. As Vincent Bronsard of Intermarche stated to CB News in March 2019, the anniversary was the ideal moment to depict a generation that grew up with the brand. Romance had anchored the broader platform in the 'Mieux manger' positioning since March 2017, using emotional storytelling to differentiate Intermarche from larger rivals including E.Leclerc and Carrefour.
The Romance platform for Intermarche won the Grand Prix Effie in France in 2018 for the preceding 'L'amour, l'amour' campaign, according to CB News. That award is the most prominent publicly verified recognition for the platform. No specific Effie or equivalent award for 'C'est Magnifique' itself is documented in the public record.
Intermarche held approximately 15.0% of French grocery market share in mid-2019, according to lsa-conso.fr. That places it behind E.Leclerc at 21.4% and Carrefour at 20.5% during the same period, also per lsa-conso.fr. The brand's share rose incrementally across the period when the Romance emotional platform was active in France.
The film uses Benjamin Biolay's version of 'C'est Magnifique,' originally composed by Cole Porter, according to CB News and adsoftheworld.com. Biolay's contemporary interpretation provides French cultural specificity while grounding the campaign's romantic narrative in an internationally recognised musical standard, reinforcing both the anniversary theme and the emotional tone Romance established across the platform.
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