John Lewis makes Spring ad debut with product-focussed guided tour

New boss Sharon White is wasting no time trying to revive John Lewis & Partners and the troubled retailer is launching its first Spring TV campaign, a product-focussed effort from adam&eveDDB showcasing its new customer-friendly offerings (cookery classes, in-store stylists) across home, fashion and, for the first time, beauty.

More than 200 products feature, 60 per cent own label. The theme is ‘Spring: we’ll help you style it.’

Marketing director Martin George says: “We know that our customers want to hear more from us outside of the Christmas period which is why we’ve launched our first ever Spring advertising campaign, enabling us as a business to connect with more people in the most relevant way.”

White still has the heavy lifting to come, specifically the Partnership’s ‘Never Knowingly Undersold’ price match promise and also former boss Charlie Mayfield’s welding together of JL and Waitrose managers, which she may decide to untangle. JL also needs to decide whether to abandon or (more likely) tinker with its traditional Christmas spectacular.

This campaign is hardly likely to earn the plaudits that one usually does but it’s not a bad idea to show the benefits and possibilities of a department store, assuming it has enough of these new bits. JL, which is lumbered with lots of big stores, badly needs more footfall.

MAA creative scale: 6.