The John Lewis Partnership gets a bonus from marketing

The sight of John Lewis staff jumping into the air on hearing that they are to receive a bonus of 18% is a delightful good news story. But it’s not only the staff that should be jumping into the air. Every member of The Marketing Society should also jump – or at least raise some part of their anatomy – an eyebrow will do – to celebrate this good news story about marketing.

We take it for granted now that both John Lewis and Waitrose walk off with major prizes at our award ceremonies, but you don’t have to be very long in the marketing tooth to remember a time when the John Lewis Partnership was not just run by the staff; it was run for the staff, and the customer and marketing didn’t get a look in.

The founder (who sold the company to the staff in 1929) John Spedan Lewis didn’t believe in advertising, and until 1995 they just never did it. They did have a very famous slogan, “Never knowingly undersold”, which was scrupulously checked and observed, but the shop opening hours were somewhat quaint and the atmosphere inside the stores of fading gentility was not too far removed from the television sitcom Are You Being Served?

The management were clever, nice and terribly proper. They tended to come from the top level of the Civil Service like their chairman Stuart Hampson, or from the armed services. It was supremely orderly and well run, but it was definitely not customer-led.

In the early 1990s they recruited Luke Mayhew as their ‘Research and Expansion Director’. Luke was from the right top draw as a former fast track civil servant, but he had also spent time in marketing at Thomas Cook and British Airways, and he set about creating a very polite revolution in John Lewis.

Through the nineties, all their quaintly named regional department stores were re-branded John Lewis (with the special exception of Peter Jones, of course) and in 1994 a consultant called Diana Kelsey started rather daringly talking to advertising agencies. Burkitt Edwards Martin were appointed as the first John Lewis advertising agency in 1995, and our key client was the MD of the new John Lewis department store at Cheadlehume – Mark Price. He soon went on to even greater things as the Marketing Director of Waitrose and produced outstanding advertising for them in a rather surprising partnership with the cigar smoking John Banks at Banks Hoggins O’Shea.

Meanwhile an ex army captain called Charlie Mayfield had been recruited from McKinsey, and from very early on he was being talked about as a future leader of the business. The ‘ex army’ bit always makes good copy for journalists but more importantly he had also spent four years at Smith Kline Beecham as a marketing man on their consumer brands like Lucozade. While there he worked for one of the Society’s fellows, Peter Jensen, who tells me that he had to keep reminding Charlie not to call everyone “sir”.

Working with ad agencies is of course just the outward sign of much internal change. But the combination of outside advisers who are acutely tuned to monitoring and feeding back customers’ views, and a growing band of key leaders inside the business who got marketing and the importance of the consumer has caused the whole partnership to dramatically accelerate its growth in the last decade. The partnership has won prizes for its Waitrose customer magazine, its John Lewis TV advertising, Waitrose essentials won the Society’s Awards for Excellence Grand Prix last year and John Lewis was voted our brand of the year at our Annual Dinner.

These are outward symptoms of a profound change in orientation of the whole business since the early nineties. But some of the good things about the Partnership haven’t changed. As anyone who has shopped at John Lewis knows, talking to a member of staff who actually understands what he is selling, but has no short term interest in selling it to you unless it really is the right thing for you, also knows that the Partnership staff remain a fantastic competitive advantage.

Despite the cautious words of Charlie Mayfield about consumer expenditure in the coming year, I suspect they’ll get another pretty good bonus next year. You can make the comparison with bankers’ bonuses for yourself. All the partners of John Lewis deserve every penny of this year’s bonus, and marketers everywhere who believe that marketing should lead the business should celebrate with them.

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