The Christmas and Festive season is upon us…
…and that means the annual parade of special Christmas advertisements from Big Names and Big Brands.
This year in the UK, John Lewis…a department store with a food business in Waitrose…is at the front of the pack and has attracted a fair amount of attention.
Here’s the great Drayton Bird…
“Here in the UK the John Lewis Department store runs excessively schmaltzy Christmas ads.
They’re all very well made tear-jerkers put together by very creative people.
The theory is they make you feel so kindly towards the store you go in and buy more.
In their latest a boy discovers a crash landed alien in the woods, and teaches her all about Christmas, before she flies home in her spaceship.”
All well and good you might think…what’s wrong with a “Feel-good” ad at this time of year?
It’s absolutely fine…UNLESS…
…you’re interested in getting a return on the cost of the ad and actually making some money.
Back to Drayton…
“Is it time, then, to remember the words of David Ogilvy’s mentor Raymond Rubicam, which I quote at the start of Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing?
You may have seen me quote them before.
‘The only purpose of advertising is to sell. It has no other function worth mentioning.’
John Lewis’s ads are works of art. But how about their profits?”
The John Lewis business is not doing too well at the moment.
Profits are down in recent years. They’ve had to close a number of stores and cost cutting is the order of the day.
One BIG indication that all is not well is the move away from the core business towards financial services and real estate.
Customers do not appear to be happy.
Here’s a indication of what’s going wrong at John Lewis. It’s from Juliet Samuel in the UK “Daily Telegraph”. I hope I’m not being presumptuous when I suggest that this is a “Cri de coeur” from someone who should be a core customer for John Lewis…
“I’ve given up on John Lewis and it’s not because of their ghastly ad, featuring a boy trashing his parents’ house while smeared in make-up. It’s because John Lewis has given up on me.
The recent debacle over the John Lewis Partnership’s ill-judged, child-dress-up advert is a symptom of the problem at Britain’s once-treasured department store.
It’s not only that the corporate ethos has evidently been captured by Left-wing culture warriors. It isn’t even that the ad has just been withdrawn for being “potentially misleading”. It’s the fact that trying to buy good-quality John Lewis products has become a nightmarish and infuriating ordeal.
Suppose you are on a mission to buy a baby cot. This is a John Lewis staple: a product that should be good quality, plain, pleasant-looking and in no way designer or antique.
The website would seem to be a logical place to start. It looks all right at first. Yes, it doesn’t quite offer the next-hour delivery we have come to expect from Amazon, but half a week is a reasonable time frame.
That’s until you realise the mattress, sold separately from the cot, will take a further four weeks to appear, by which time the growing baby will be practically folded double in its Moses basket. Try to buy an adult bed and you will be lucky if it arrives within two months.”
More along the same lines follows. The full article is at “John Lewis’s woke advert is a sign of a deeper malaise at the troubled retailer”.
People in this kind of mood are not likely to change their mind and start flocking back to John Lewis simply because of a charming, schmaltzy ad.
The John Lewis ads are known as “Brand Advertising”…very different from the kind of direct response ads and marketing that I usually write about. They are not a good guide for the vast majority of businesses that run on tight budgets and where there needs to be a clear return from every penny spent on advertising and marketing.
So enjoy the Big Brand Christmas Ads…if that’s the kind of thing you like. But when it comes to your own advertising…stick to an approach that delivers real results for your business.