Guest blog by Nick Eggleton
Over the decades there have been a number of commercials on television that use sentimentality in order to achieve their advertising objectives. One current offer in particular has been using syrupy techniques for a few years now and it irks me for some reason. Not because I’m not an emotional modern man, but because I feel it’s corny and patronising.
The ad in particular that broke this camel’s back and forced pen to paper (or index fingers to keyboard to be more accurate) is the latest from the John Lewis Partnership. ‘Never Knowingly Undersold’ (NKU) features a split narrative and split screen effect to deliver its message.
I don’t know if my ‘problem’ with it is as an ‘ad man’, as I see through the communication and sense the strategic purpose as if it were in subtitles along the bottom of the screen: Shift perception of JL from an expensive household goods department store to a fashion and beauty store offering the world’s oldest price promise.
Or if I sense the ‘creative team’ using a massive slice of the client’s £7 million ad budget to realise their showreel / award ambitions. (Adam&EveDBB won the Gold of Golds at this year’s Creative Circle Awards for the Christmas 2011 ad, which also won gold in the best over 60-second film category). Star ‘director’, soundtrack by Paloma Faith, covering the INXS song Never Tear Us Apart, the best cinema photography outside Hollywood etc. all cost a pretty penny.
Or is it the gushy self congratulatory campaign has been grating on me since their return to TV in 2008 and has now played for too long.
Craig Inglis, Director of Marketing at JLP, described the script for this 90 second film as a ‘beautiful love story delivered in a really innovative way’. Is that the purpose of advertising? To deliver love stories innovatively?
I suspect the brief didn’t say something like, ‘follow up the schmaltzy ads we have been doing for years with another sentimental pile of none-sense’. So what’s the point of it?
Ben Tollet, Executive Creative Director at adam&eveDDB, the agency behind it, described the juxtaposition of 1925 and 2012 in terms of the NKU promise, ‘the promise is as relevant today as it’s ever been’. I think that’s in a nutshell the reason why JLP never resonated with me. ‘Never Knowingly Undersold’ as a strapline is too much of a get out clause.
Mr Blog in ‘his’’ piece (http://www.mr-blog.com/2010/10/mr-cheap-southsea.html) put the problem as eloquently as I ever could about absolute promises. JLP could hardly say ‘we don’t mean to overcharge you’, could they?
I guess what I’m driving at is I don’t accept the shrieking emotional proposition of the treatment against the rational ‘we’ll refund the difference in price if it’s an exact match on service level, as long as the competitor isn’t an online only business, or more than 8 miles from us and carries the same insurance and delivery conditions’ weaselling that has become an endemic retail issue.
But is it effective? Does it achieve its objectives? The answer to the question, is an emotional treatment of a rational proposition effective is, unfortunately, ‘yes’.
Last year ‘partners’ (as the shareholder co-operative workforce are called) made a profit of £60 million. They continue to be highly respected and are growing.
Emotional propositions sell because humans are, well, human. The ad may look like a Marie Stopes, family planning since 1921, advert to me, but that is irrelevant.
I guess I’m almost the right demographic (middle aged and middle class) to be included in their target audience, so why does this campaign leave me feeling cold. Well ‘almost’ isn’t close enough. This ad is aimed straight at yummy mummies, not grumpy gits like me.
Maybe the issue is mine. I’m not engaged or enraptured by this smoke and mirrors because it’s not aimed at me, and there is the nub of successful brand development. Know your customer.
I still don’t like it.
From a creative point of view the advert seems, to me, to be a bit of a rip-off of Midnight in Paris by Woody Allen.
From a marketing perspective John Lewis does not want to have its reputation sullied by promoting its brand based on a price message so its adverts focus on a kind of world which is fuzzy around the edges and allows us to wallow in a musical form of nostalgia.
I do agree that they target their demographic very well but I can’t forgive them for ruining a great Smiths song!!
It annoys me for other reasons… While I guess many West Yorkshire folk are unfamiliar with John Lewis (except through the small number of Waitrose supermarkets here), I’ve effectively been a John Lewis shopper since birth (only it was called Cole Brothers then – in the early 2000s, the Partnership decided to retire the original names of the stores taken over from other companies in favour of a single brand)
John Lewis, and its supermarket Waitrose (which is based in the town where I grew up) have long been a part of my life. I’ve been a Waitrose bargain hunter for 30 years, and most of my kitchen equipment is from there. Their employee-owned ethic does make a difference (in my opinion) and their products are good value (this is not the same as “cheap”). Until fairly recently, you could be fairly sure that John Lewis would be the cheapest on an equivalent product.
So why would they annoy me? Exactly for the reasons in the last 2 paragraphs. OK, so people whose first encounter with Waitrose was when the Meanwood store opened a couple of years ago might not understand how I’m not quite over how, 2 rebrands ago, the stores were bright orange (really) – the Queen would never have said she shopped there (even though it’s likely she did even back then) and there were overcrowded stores with long checkout queues.
In one sense, they’ve not changed – they’ve generally offered good quality products at good prices, but in another, the advent of the internet age led to them dropping half of “Never Knowingly Undersold” when they decided not to price match online, they’ve been trying to chase a more aspirational clientèle whilst conversely actually going downmarket (some of the Value range is obviously not that good quality, and there’s been a move to things like celebrity chef cookware and the same colour fashion rubbish that infected the likes of Debenhams and House of Fraser years ago).
I can go on, of course… their staff are less knowledgeable than they used to be (but still streets ahead of the likes of Debenhams and Currys), they no longer sell spare parts, Waitrose used the cover of price matching Tesco to *raise* prices, Waitrose seems to cater less to people who love cooking and exploring new things, and more to people after posh convenience foods…
So what of the adverts? This new one in particular paints a picture of the most traditional of department stores, which I suppose John Lewis is… but in reality, they’ve moved with the times, and that’s what I hate about them.
(with the caveat that it’s the things you have most affection for that frustrate you the most when they don’t seem to return that affection. When loaves of bread are 35p they can do no wrong, etc.)
I like John Lewis as a store and loved the Christmas advert. However, sometimes you see an advert, think it’s funny, or attractive, or emotionally engaging, and then it gets to the end and the brand seems to be in no way connected with the ‘story’. I get the impression that someone at the advertising agency has come up with a great idea, but then has to fit it to a brand, rather than vice versa. This new JL advert, for me, is a prime example of that.