Comment: The danger of being in the middle of the road AS THEY say, the danger with being middle-of-the-road is that you risk getting knocked down by a lorry. The early feedback from festive and final-quarter trading for food retailers suggests both premium and discount players have done well. It is those who cleave to the centre ground - typfied by the hapless Morrisons - which look to have suffered most. Upmarket Waitrose, so reassuringly expensive to its devotees, set the bar high with an impressive 5.4 per cent rise in like-for-like Christmas and New Year sales. Meanwhile, new research from Kantar WorldPanel estimates discounters Aldi and Lidl saw sales jumps of 30.1 and 10.8 per cent respectively in the three months to Christmas. One of Aldi and Lidl's tricks, apparently, was to sell just enough premium products at lower prices to attract shoppers in for their wider shops. Kantar says Sainsbury, again with a pricier south of England image that its chief executive Justin King says belies its broad appeal, was the only one of the Big Four to see a market share gain in the 12 weeks to 23 December - up to 17.1 per cent from 17 per cent. Sainsbury's reports today, while Kantar says Tesco, which posts figures tomorrow, has seen its market-leading share decline to 30.5 per cent from 30.6 per cent. At least Tesco boss, Philip Clarke, can comfort himself that the group seems to be pulling out of the dive. Tesco's average market share drop over the whole of 2012 was 0.4 per cent. Marks & Spencer, whose food operations also attract the gentry, reports tomorrow. Its food operations will have had a resilient festive period, as they have for the past couple of years. The above is not just a case of people with money still spending on premium-priced food and those with stretched finances shopping for bargains. Even the monied like a discount, and could well be splitting their shop between the higher and lower ends of the market. Which takes us back to Morrisons, suffering a disappointing 2.5 per cent sales fall in the Christmas run-up, hit by a lack of an online food offering and a scanty convenience store operation. The company looks in a twilight zone at the minute. Too many customers think it is neither fish nor fowl: not upmarket but certainly not an unmistakable discounter. Morrisons is in the middle of that road as the Waitrose's and Sainsbury's roar down one lane and the Aldi's, Lidl's and Asda's rev up the other. World Cup winner joins the advertising game He shoots, he scores, he runs it up the flagpole and see who salutes it. Former Brazilian World Cup winner Ronaldo is to spend several months in London from February learning about advertising at the feet of industry guru, Sir Martin Sorrell. The galactico has obviously mastered the basics. In 2010 Ronaldo set up a sports marketing agency in Sao Paulo, calling it 9ine, from his preferred shirt number, and, crucially, meeting the advertising industry's inveterate need to spell words strangely in the pursuit of cutting-edge illiteracy. WPP invested in it and a nascent relationship was born with Sorrell. The latter is well-known for his addresses to the nation on such issues as corporate taxation. Ronaldo would be advised to expunge "giving 110 per cent" from his vocabulary.