Mark Ritson: John Lewis at 100 proves there is a way back from slogan self-sabotage

Spedan was quite possibly the world’s nicest person. In photos, he looks like an Edwardian version of Superman. His subsequent actions in charge of Peter Jones and later the whole John Lewis Partnership suggest such comparisons aren’t misplaced.

He had been so appalled at the discovery that, between himself, his brother and his father, the trio earned more than everyone employed at the company that, for example, he set up the partnership structure that shared profits across the firm.

And that same ridiculous degree of decency fed his pricing conundrum back in 1925. Like most marketing, pricing is typically a challenge of the three Cs.

You need to get it low enough to win customers and beat competitors, but high enough to ensure the company will make money. That’s tricky at the best of times. But for Spedan, making too much money would have been just as bad as not making enough. He wanted a life-long relationship with his customers, and he knew that would be built on fairness and trust.

So he made them a public promise.

If they purchased a product from Peter Jones and later found it sold elsewhere for less, they could return to his store and receive the balance. It was a tactic his father had promoted on Oxford Street, but the pricing promise that Spedan made was more earnest and long-lived.

‘Never Knowingly Undersold’ was born in Chelsea that day and spread to Oxford Street after Spedan took over the whole empire. The slogan gradually propagated on to gift tokens, carrier bags, delivery vans and finally advertising. But it also did something more profound. It became an internal mantra for John Lewis buyers, ensuring they relentlessly pushed for the best supplier deals, so the company could keep its promise to customers.

‘Never Knowingly Undersold’ is, technically, a rubbish statement.

ChatGPT would reject it in microseconds. It starts with a negative. Moves to an esoteric adverb. Then, it fizzles out with the past participle of a word that was last used when Queen Victoria was on the throne.

And yet – as so often is the case with ancient tactical fare – there is something mighty here. We know that unusual grammatical structures make for cognitive disfluency and greater distinctiveness and memory. Because it came from the founder, it is auto-tuned to the brand’s positioning. And because it’s been around for a century, it is imprinted in every consumer’s memory from hundreds of touchpoints. This combination of heritage and longevity forges a priceless marketing asset.

You’d want your strategic head examined to ever get rid of a slogan like this, which is exactly what John Lewis did three years ago. Former chairwoman Sharon White was known to hate the commitment and what it meant for profitability. So in 2022, the department store told customers it was scrapping the pledge while remaining (ahem) ‘always knowingly committed to outstanding value’. After a suitably respectful pause, the retailer relaunched under a new slogan, wait for it, ‘For all life’s moments’.

It’s a branding misstep as common as it is infuriating.

The same sad story plays out every time.

Step 1: Disrespect history and be arrogant enough to think you can improve on it.

Step 2: Throw away your old slogan and the eight thousand kilos of brand equity that come with it.

Step 3: Embrace modernity with a cloying, generic slogan straight out of the bottom drawer of your current advertising agency.

Step 4: Brace for initial customer revulsion and then total ignorance as the new slogan fades into complete anonymity.

Step 5: Try to ignore the recurring consumer research telling you that the only thing target consumers remember from your new ad is the old slogan that isn’t featured in it.

Step 6: Reintroduce the old slogan once the offending management team exits the building and their replacements embrace the obvious truth.

It’s a sequence I try to educate all marketers about in my role as president of CRAPS (the Campaign for the Restoration of Authentic Past Slogans).

The CRAPS Manifesto

At CRAPS, we work with large brands that are stubbornly in denial about their new, useless messaging.

We lobby senior teams to revert to their heritage slogans. Workshops, roleplay, and occasional threatening phone calls are all employed to help marketers see the error of their ways and rediscover the power of classic promotional lines.

It’s God’s work, and there have been some glorious victories over the years (see the table below).

It’s been a personal and professional pleasure to see slogans like ‘Be Your Way’ and ‘There’s an M in everyone’ bite the bullet. That said, there is still much to do.

Stella Artois is possibly the most deluded brand in the opinion of CRAP. It has one of the greatest slogans of all time in ‘Reassuringly Expensive’ and has attempted to replace it with an array of bland nonsense, including the spectacularly mundane ‘Pass on Something Good’, followed by the equally poor ‘She is a thing of beauty’.

We await a reversion.

Meanwhile, De Beers’s move away from the greatest slogan ever created to the aberration that is ‘Real is Rare’ isn’t just a duff move; it’s an offense to branding and should be prosecuted with lengthy sentences and perhaps corporal punishment.

But I reserve the greatest CRAP antipathy for Hilton Hotels.

It was given the kind of golden slogan in ‘Take me to the Hilton’ that should outlast a diamond, real or not. I defy you to emerge from an airport, slump into the back of a fragrant taxi, and not think about it the next time you travel. Despite that and two decades of investment, it then opted for the inane genericism of ‘Travel should take you places’. Yes, yes, it should.

Duh.

And by the same token, slogans should be distinctive and redolent of the brand, and marketers should know what the fuck they are doing.

So here’s my plea, from CRAP HQ, to every marketer dancing with disaster: when your heritage line is beloved, don’t touch it.

Don’t modernize it.

Don’t “evolve the messaging.”

Keep your filthy, busy hands off the crown jewels and let your brand bask in the glow of genuine, hard-won originality. This is not just because it works, but because anything else is always going to fall short.

Aside from his presidential role at CRAP, Mark Ritson is a former marketing professor, brand consultant, and award-winning columnist. He is also the founder of the MiniMBA in Brand Management which, kicks off very soon (but still has some spaces) and has trained thousands of brand managers how to do it better.

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