John Lewis' Charlotte Lock Is Building The Home of Gifting

The long wait is over: 'The Gifting Hour' is here.

After months of build-up and even an unprecedented teaser, the festive institution that is the John Lewis Christmas ad has arrived [14 November]. It’s a feast of nostalgia, highlighting the magic of festive shopping, and the quest for the perfect gift for a special person.

Channelling a little bit of Narnia, a little bit of Richard Curtis, and a heavy dose of John Lewis magic, the ad, created by Saatchi & Saatchi, follows main character Sally as she searches the flagship Oxford Street store – by way of a wardrobe and 30 years of memories – while hunting down the perfect gift for her sister.

“It’s a tale of two sisters,” reveals Charlotte Lock, customer director, who flags the retailer’s 65 per cent female shopper demographic, as she explains: “We wanted to feature a relationship that we haven’t done before. So the ad depicts memories of sisterhood in a surreal, non-linear way, featuring a stormy teenage argument, and amazing moments like pregnancy, which allow us to connect with the people we love. We are heroing the gift-giver, which we have never done before, and featuring a store, which we have also never done before in a Christmas ad.”

The film was shot in the retailer’s flagship Oxford Street store, and once again features that vital ingredient of any John Lewis Christmas campaign – an emotive soundtrack featuring the cover of a classic song. This time it’s from Ivor Novello Award-Winning Richard Ashcroft, of The Verve fame, with ‘Sonnet’. In addition, the campaign also features a talent competition to raise funds for the Building Happier Futures charity which supports care-experienced people.

When the third part of the retailer’s golden-quarter playbook is released, Lock will watch for the reaction with the John Lewis and Saatchi & Saatchi teams which have been working so “symbiotically with the brand” for the past few months.

The home of gifting

“It's really positioning us as the home of gifting, and the shop is at the heart of that, which was a very deliberate part of the brief. We’ve been talking [with the Saatchi team] for the past year about we how we bring John Lewis back to what everybody loves about it, and the shop just felt so critical. And we wanted the truth and authenticity of a real story, so we didn’t want a character,” says Lock, explaining that the casting process involved more than 1000 different options “before they got the chemistry between the sisters right.”

The ad is the grand finale of the brand’s bold three-chapter strategy for the 2024 season, and represents the culmination of the retailer’s “biggest-ever marketing investment.” The more stretched out and strategic approach has been a departure from its usual feted Christmas big bang approach, as the creative transitions elegantly from ‘Live Knowingly’ in chapter one to ‘Give Knowingly’ in chapter two, and ‘The Gifting Hour’ in chapter three.

The first chapter ‘The Window’ – released in September to chime with the store’s revival of its promise Never Knowingly Undersold – showcases the history of the brand through a single window of the iconic John Lewis Oxford Street store, spanning eras from the roaring 1920s, the outbreak of war in the 30s, and the swinging 60s, through to present day.

The second chapter – released on 1 November for the build-up to Black Friday – is more commercially motivated, with a firm eye on gifting inspiration. It includes eight iterations featuring a sackful of gifts, ranging from cashmere to gadgets from brands including Nespresso, Apple, Ninja, and Samsung, and beauty from Charlotte Tilbury. Products designed by Izaac, a care-experienced designer from the MxC range also appear in the campaign, with proceeds from sales going to care-experienced charities, alongside the retailer’s employment programme to bring this community into roles within John Lewis.

The thread that runs through the three chapters was carefully thought out with the team at Saatchi & Saatchi, explains Lock, in a bid to unpack what ‘knowingly’ really meant. It represents “the truth about our customers and what motivates them, and the truth about our brand.”

She continues: “It really is to live a life that is full of intention and connection, that values things like kindness and doing the right thing. And those values are very dear to John Lewis, and values that we recognise mirrored in our customers. It’s about striving for a good life, doing the right thing, enjoying things that give you pleasure, doing that unashamedly – seeking happiness and joy in a way that's consistent with a set of values.”

And it’s already working, she claims, having sat down with Google in the past week to hear about search volumes, which are up 17 per cent in organic since the campaign began in September. The retailer’s NPS score is up by 10 points, while customer numbers are up by 4 per cent, with gifting and the Christmas shop up by 18 per cent in value sales year-on-year.

The “secret sauce” of the John Lewis legacy

So, can John Lewis still pull off the magic of its legacy of Christmas campaigns, dating back to 2011’s ‘The Long Wait’, which arguably birthed the genre itself?

Says Lock: “This year we've been really ambitious with all our Golden Quarter advertising. ‘The Window’ had that very cinematic quality. It was rich in storytelling. It was really powerful. And you know, the research that's been done independently suggests it really hit the mark. We haven’t deviated from the things that work well. But we have changed things up so that we don't become cliched.”

The most successful Christmas campaigns, she says, have at their heart a powerful insight, a connection, and hold a mirror up so audiences see something of themselves.

“There is always truth in the campaigns and great storytelling, and that's something I've long admired about John Lewis advertising. The freedom to tell a story and do so in a way that is visually and emotionally captivating. All the way back to the early days of ‘The Long Wait’ and ‘The Bear And The Hare’ – they’re short films and they don't try too hard to be adverts. They have the freedom to tell a story and connect emotionally and I think that is the secret sauce.”

It's the emotional storytelling and the connection that audiences make with the characters in the John Lewis Christmas ads that Lock credits with making the ads especially powerful.

“They created a platform for other amazing Christmas ads. I think there are some brilliant ones out there from lots of brands now, and it's a fantastic thing that we've got. It's our Super Bowl, isn't it? It’s where everybody shows up with their best storytelling. And I think we've got my forebears at John Lewis to thank for that.”

In common with the Super Bowl, viewings come increasingly from social media alongside broadcast channels. Having spent the day before the ad airs talking to major broadcasters and consumer titles, Lock knows how important the ad is to media outlets looking to grab eyeballs.

“If I look back to when the John Lewis Christmas ad phenomenon started, it was about peak ad breaks reaching 20 million people. The media landscape has changed so much. Last year, we got 100 million views, just on social – and 50 million of those before it even aired on television. Social media is our biggest outlet – it’s a very different kind of media mix that we look at, and social is critically important,” says Lock.

Saatchi & Saatchi: “bringing creative push and challenge”

Lock is unfazed by the responsibility of delivering the nation’s favourite Christmas ad this year. While she only started at John Lewis a couple of years ago (April 2022), this isn’t the first household name she has stewarded - she was previously Co-Op’s data and loyalty director and also held multiple director positions during her decade at the BBC.

Having also completed stints in agency-land with McCann Worldgroup and BJL (now part of Dentsu) perhaps means she’s more attuned to the power and energy that positive agency relationships can deliver for brands. And as John Lewis has “more than tripled” its marketing output during this golden quarter, the relationship with Saatchi & Saatchi has been put to the test.

Namechecking Saatchi & Saatchi’s Richard Huntington, CSO, Franki Goodwin, CCO, and Sarah ‘SJ’ Jenkins, COO, and their teams, Lock says: “I just can't fault them. They're exceptional. They're bringing us such a lot of creative push and challenge. They very quickly ‘got’ John Lewis. It isn't a brand that that should try to be cool. I want John Lewis to be so uncool that we're cool, but very unintentionally. So, we sell bone china and cashmere, as well as the latest fashions, and we should be proud of our heritage,” she says.

Lock also credits Saatchi & Saatchi with a diversity of thought and representation still not yet commonly seen in many top London creative shops, for which she calls out its Upriser programme, through which the agency has trained and employed people from a wide range of backgrounds, leading to a higher level of creativity.

“They support people to come into the industry who genuinely would have no chance of being able to afford to live in London. I remember when I entered the advertising world in the 90s, it was mainly people who had come from private school. It was a particular profile, and the pay was very low, so you had to be very privileged to be able to afford it. But now you feel the difference at Saatchi’s. The people that are in the account teams, the production assistants that just wouldn't be there otherwise. And I think we get better creativity because we get different perspectives, more diverse thinking, more representative voices, more representative work, different work, more original work,” says Lock.

But as a new agency coming in (Saatchi & Saatchi only won the account in May 2023), was there a temptation for the Publicis Groupe agency to try and put their own mark on the brand?

“There's never been a sense of ‘reinvent John Lewis.’ And what was really evident throughout the pitch wasn’t a stiff reverence for the brand, but a real love and understanding of the brand, which is why the advertising that we've just launched is recognisably John Lewis. It feels so ‘us’ – and yet a modern version of us.”

Spinning gold out of the festive quarter

In retail, this time of year may be known as "the golden quarter", but in certain circles it could also be monikered "the John Lewis quarter", with the retailer arguably responsible for putting the UK’s festive advertising supremacy at the top of the (Christmas) tree.

The retailer’s biggest-ever marketing investment could also prove a gamble worth higher stakes than ever. With the British economy stabilising and the cost-of-living crisis easing for many, 2024 Christmas spending is forecast to rise by 4 per cent to £88.29 billion – the highest ever, according to research by Global Data.

Shoppers are forecast to spend an extra £3.39 billion compared to last year, and an enormous £14.03 billion more than ten years ago. Meanwhile, the same research shows each person in the UK is expected to spend £1,328.88 over the six-week Christmas period as they splurge on gifts, food and drink, travel, and other festive treats.  

“The reason John Lewis is good at storytelling is that we invest a lot in insight, so we try to stay close to our customers, and what they're thinking and feeling, and connect with them emotionally,” says Lock. “And we saw that customers were really thinking about Christmas much earlier, and that actually most Black Friday purchases are now gifts. It used to be that people would be out there on Black Friday in a slightly unseemly scramble to bag a big TV. It's shifted quite significantly. And especially in what remains a cost-of-living crisis. People are using competitive prices to be able to plan for Christmas earlier and earlier.”

Indeed, Mintel research shows most consumers start buying gifts for Christmas in November, though a quarter start in September, or even earlier. And November has become a key gifting period, with nearly two-thirds of all purchases made over the period bought as Christmas gifts.

However, the John Lewis insight wasn’t just about prices, it also showed customers want to buy from a brand whose values resonate with them. So – with price and quality being equal – they want to buy from a brand who they respect for its purpose and values. And that is the point of differentiation for John Lewis, says Lock, with ‘Never Knowingly Undersold’ standing as shorthand for quality, service, price and trust, where customers know they’re not being charged a premium for that.

With brands set to spend a record £10.5 billion in the UK on advertising over the Christmas season, according to the Advertising Association and WARC, 2024 is not only set to be the highest-spending Christmas ever, but also potentially the trickiest in which to achieve cut-through to ever-fragmented audiences.

“The nation loves John Lewis”

But nothing says cut-through like making BBC breaking news, which might be rare for a brand strapline, but on the day John Lewis announced the return of its 100-year-old ‘Never Knowingly Undersold’ promise [5 September], that’s exactly what happened.

“We all looked at our phones and pointed them at each other and went, ‘what is happening?’ BBC breaking news,” Lock says. “We know we're in a very privileged position in that the nation loves John Lewis. The nation feels invested in John Lewis. It’s a national treasure. And therefore, if we do anything, the nation talks about it. It’s extremely helpful. We weren't surprised it was well-received; we knew it would be from a research perspective. But we were surprised at how quickly customers responded, and how quickly sales responded.”

The move had an instant impact on NPS scores, which are now up 10 per cent year-on-year. Online, the retailer has had 90,000 more visitors to its website per day since the (re)-launch of the brand promise. And although 2024 has generally been a tough year in retail, says Lock, September value sales figures from the British Retail Consortium showed John Lewis sales were up by 6 per cent, outperforming the 3.6 per cent increase seen by the market as whole.  

Today’s promise has come a long way from what it used to be, when pressure fell on shop-floor staff to look at customer receipts from competitors to manually check price differences.

“It was all very manual, and operationally draining. It was quite dissatisfying for customers, and not really fit for purpose, for how modern shoppers shop. So it wasn't about the slogan, it was about the proposition that underpinned it, and by bringing it back, we are matching online prices,” explains Lock.  

Using AI, the retailer is now matching against 25 leading high street and online retailers such as M&S, Curry's, Boots, Amazon on electricals. So rather than having people in offices checking prices, for example, it's done by an AI price-scraping tool with a real-time handle on how prices are shifting, which Lock believes offers the kind of reassurance that today’s shoppers want.

The customer (director) is always right

Being a customer director – rather than a chief marketing officer – means the customer is always front of mind for Lock. It’s a role she thinks more companies could consider adopting, in order to take an umbrella view of the end-to-end customer journey.

This is especially true for John Lewis, as the nation’s biggest omnichannel retailer, and the fifth biggest website in the UK (rising to second at Christmas), with 60 per cent of sales coming online, but often after customers have been into a shop. The retailer has just 35 shops, but 18,000 click-and-collect locations with the goal that customers are never more than 10 minutes away from their John Lewis item.

“Anybody reading this from John Lewis will recognise that I’m a big fan of the stores, they're literally the shop window for the brand. They’re our point of experience, of differentiation, that feeling you get when you walk into a John Lewis that is so special and exciting and inspiring and safe, all at the same time. For me, our shops are the heart of our brand. And yes, I absolutely have invested more significantly in marketing that celebrates our shops.”

Lock points to the reinstation of local marketing to support shops with events and experiences, while the shop experience team that sits within her broader team have put in over 800 shop enhancements this year.

“And we have just relaunched Oxford Street,” she says, “which we're incredibly proud of. It is genuinely an emporium, and given that there aren't many department stores left, we have such an opportunity to create a fabulous destination. Shops are absolutely at the heart of what makes us special, always. And I think we're getting back to that with the help of Peter Ruis, our new exec director.”

Lock’s remit, which covers every customer touchpoint, from store formats and experiences, through to advertising, has given her the objectivity to find customer pain points, but also to create inspiration and seek out new opportunities, like the collaboration with Jamie Oliver’s Cookery School, or the launch of the Sol de Janeiro  and Trinny London brands across the estate. These are bringing new audiences, says Lock, alongside a wellness campaign featuring tech and beauty products, which is planned for the new year.  

“Marketing is a big part of my job,” she says, “and I've got a brilliant marketing team. I think having that alongside retail media, loyalty, branding, retail and store experience, customer product, means that my senior leadership team have a really holistic view of the customer, and there's a really strong and collaborative understanding of what we need to do together. It works from my perspective, but I have also worked in organisations where my remit has been narrower, broader, or just different.”

So, what’s in store for the future of advertising as the world spins towards 2030? Lock believes AI will make vast content creation quicker, easier, and cheaper; while more data-driven personalisation will create an expectation that advertising is always relevant; platforms will continue to expand, especially retail media, and content creation will continue to be democratised. 

“I'm hopeful that these factors will create an environment where storytelling, emotional advertising that's motivating, fresh, and true, is even more needed and celebrated.”

The world according to Charlotte Lock

Who is your creative hero or favourite piece of creativity?

I absolutely love Anish Kapoor [Sir Anish Mikhail Kapoor, CBE, RA, a British-Indian sculptor specialising in installation art and conceptual art], and I would choose Cloud Gate in Chicago.

What’s been feeding your imagination lately (e.g. a place, a painting, a piece of architecture, a view, a piece of music, a memory etc)?

I watched The Boy and the Heron with my 12-year-old recently. And [director/writer] Hayao Miyazaki is a huge hero of mine. He's 83 years old and still stimulating my imagination in a way that is just off the chart.

It's such beautiful animation that comes out of Studio Ghibli, but also the concept of approaching death and life in that incredibly creative way.

I absolutely love Japanese culture anyway, but compare Ghibli to Disney’s predictable saccharine polish – Ghibli movies are so unpredictable, and it’s all coming from this rampant imagination, so layered, so deep, and so engrossing.

What has been your boldest creative play?

This one is really personal to me, but at the time we didn't realise how bold it was. I worked at the BBC for a decade, running marketing and audiences, and produced BBC trailers. Back in 2017, amidst Brexit and Trump, when we all thought ‘what on earth is happening to Western values?’ We spoke to Kay Benbow, the controller of CBeebies, which is aimed at 0-6-year-olds, the youngest of the BBC’s viewers, about making a statement.

We were working with Karmarama at the time, and we gave them a brief to create an alternative perspective for young people, for children who were growing up in a world that elects Donald Trump and votes for Brexit, showing them a world that's more tolerant.  

They created a film which at the time was very controversial, and we had to really push to get it through. The film featured a load of kids, and we just said to them, ‘What makes you different?’ And we cast a Down’s Syndrome girl with her friend. We cast someone with brown skin, someone with white skin, all different tones of skin. And we showed somebody in a wheelchair. We showed really visible differences, and we put those kids together and we asked them ‘What makes you different?'

We didn't brief them, and they said things like, ‘Marsha likes lettuce, but I don't like lettuce,’ or ‘you like ketchup, but I don't like ketchup.’ We filmed hours of it, and not once did any of them say ‘she's got brown skin, she's in a wheelchair, she's got a disability’. And it was the most magical film.

We put it on air, and we said, ‘CBeebies, Everyone's Welcome’. It was such a contrast to the mood of the nation at the time, which was so divisive and unkind.  The message was that we weren't like this when we were kids, so what's happened to us as adults, that we can be so racist and misogynistic.

We were nervous putting it out, and we had the support of the BBC at the time, but the BBC has to be very a-political. But the response was phenomenal, and it still gets re-shared.

The other reason it's so moving is, unfortunately, Kay Benbow passed away last year, which was devastating for all of us, but so many people re-shared that film, and it was so Kay. She was a brilliant storyteller, a fantastic commissioner who dedicated most of her life to the BBC. She left this amazing legacy of inclusion, and always inspired children to learn in a way that was positive and healthy, and I'm really proud of having been involved in that.

How did it pay off, and what lessons did that teach you?

It taught me to be clear on the values of your brand, and not to be afraid to express them – of course in a tone that's consistent with your brand. 

We changed John Lewis & Partners to John Lewis & Sisters earlier this year in a call out for female makers to work with us; we brought back Never Knowingly Undersold supported by a series of thoughtful provocations you wouldn't expect from a retailer, such as ‘Buying Once is an Act of Rebellion’. 

In short, have a point of view on the things that matter to your brand and your customers – and back it up with relatable truths.

What do you enjoy most about being a marketer?

I am both left- and right-brain, so for me it's creative and analytical. I can analyse the numbers, and do crunchy problem-solving, but also then just wild creativity. So I think it’s the best combination of the two things.

What makes a good creative marketer?

Real clarity on what you want to achieve. Being clear on who you're targeting, what you want to say, and why. And it's all about finding the truth in the brand, understanding what the problem is to solve, not hiding from the difficult problems, and gravitating towards the good stuff. It's really about finding the right problem to solve. And then also; writing great briefs.

What makes a good creative agency partner?

Understanding the problem that we need to solve together, so Saatchi & Saatchi do that incredibly well. I think you have to be on the same page in terms of ‘what is the problem to solve?’, and not getting too distracted by just the output. The output is there to solve a problem and to communicate something clearly.

A great agency immerses themselves in your business problems and puts themselves in your shoes, but keeps enough distance so they can give you perspective and challenge and stretch, and then fun. I think you got to have fun with your agency. It's not life or death, is it? We're in advertising, so you've got to have a laugh. I think that's incredibly important, being able to enjoy ourselves together.

And what frustrates you?

Anything that is unkind or prejudiced – inequality. It really frustrates me that our industry still isn't as open as it needs to be in terms of encouraging and including people from all backgrounds. It's still too privileged, and it still doesn't look as diverse at the top as it should. So that's frustrating, but also very motivating.

What excites you about the future?

With the absolute explosion of new voices, opportunities, platforms, channels, I think it's a golden age of creativity, because the tools to be creative are all there. I think if we can create the opportunities and make sure that everybody has the opportunity, that's super-exciting.

And it’s not all about being young. You can be 83 like [director/writer] Hayao Miyazaki and still have the most rampant youthful imagination. It's about having an open mind, being experimental. And I think there's so much of that: TikTok is an amazing thing. It's hilarious, keeps all of our standards up. Creativity is being democratised, and that's exciting.