John Lewis Marketing Strategy & Marketing Mix (4Ps)
Marketing Strategy of John Lewis analyzes the brand with the marketing mix framework which covers the 4Ps (Product, Price, Place, Promotion). These business strategies, based on John Lewis marketing mix, help the brand succeed in the market. Let us start the John Lewis Marketing Strategy & Mix to understand its product, pricing, advertising & distribution strategies:
Quick Glance:
John Lewis Product Strategy:
The product strategy and mix in John Lewis marketing strategy can be explained as follows:
John Lewis is one of the leading premium retail stores based out of UK. John Lewis provides an unparallel range of services from personal styling and nursery advice to appliance installation and technical support. The retail stores provide several services as a part of their marketing mix. John Lewis provide products belonging to various sectors like Home and Design, Electricals and Technology, Gifts and Celebrations, Fashion and Beauty and Baby and Child.
In the home furnishings assortment, they have their own brand’s duvets, pillows and furnishing fabrics made in their Lancashire mill in Herbert Parkinson. The mill also provides their Made to Measure seven day curtain, roller blinds and voile services. They also have an on-site weaving operation that creates exclusive fabric designs.
Image: Wikimedia
John Lewis Price/Pricing Strategy:
Below is the pricing strategy in John Lewis marketing strategy:
John Lewis believes that fair pricing has always been the heart of their business. It adopts a competitive pricing strategy for all its products keeping the quality and value in mind.
The company regularly benchmarks its products against others in the market. Its policy ensures to capture the market with very competitive pricing amongst all players. John Lewis have a price-monitoring team that proactively keeps a check on the prices of branded products of their competitors every day including online and during sales. If they find that some competitor is selling the same product with the same service conditions, but at a lower cost, they immediately meet that price at their online as well as offline stores. This strategy is a benefit to all the customers as they will not find a lower price elsewhere and if they do they can easily make a price match request. The annual revenue of the company is in excess of $3 billion.
Read more about John Lewis
John Lewis Place & Distribution Strategy:
Following is the distribution strategy in the John Lewis marketing mix:
John Lewis uses the multi-channel strategy and uses different distribution channels to cater to its customers. Not only does the brand have several exclusive retail outlets in Britain, they have also aggressively spread their wings in the E-commerce including tapping of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. They have also released smartphone applications to add to the convenience of the customers. John Lewis has fifty stores in the whole of England. It also has a placed store in the Heathrow Airport. It also opened its first concession store in New south Wales, Australia.
Due to the 2020 pandemic, some of the stores could not perform due to loss of customers.
John Lewis Promotion & Advertising Strategy:
The promotional and advertising strategy in the John Lewis marketing strategy is as follows:
John Lewis adopts innovative promotional strategies for its products and has creatively used the occasions of festivals for developing special advertisements during the year end seasons. Since past almost ten years, every year consumers long for the creative advertisements that the company makes every year during Christmas and exploit the emotional approach to appeal. Some of their well-known campaigns are Buster the Boxer, The Journey, The Bear and the Hare, Monty the Penguin and The Long Wait. These Christmas campaigns all help deliver market-leading commercial performance and achieve a place in popular culture. They have generated millions of views of YouTube, won numerous polls at the UK’s favorite ads and ‘The Long Wait’ campaign has even become an official subject on the primary schools’ teaching curriculum. John Lewis has also stayed in line with the new age promotional tools such as “joint promotion with other product/services” example they entice customers to buy more products/services covered under the program and thereby attain a loyalty status which allows them for certain amount of free purchase. John Lewis was also associated with the Olympic Games and used that platform to increase the awareness of the brand. After successfully sponsoring the London Olympics, it also sponsored the Commonwealth Games.
Since this is a service marketing brand, here are the other three Ps to make it the 7Ps marketing mix of John Lewis.
People:
Being a service brand, John Lewis focuses a lot on its customers and even its workforce. They ensure that the customers have a good shopping experience whenever they come to the John Lewis store. More than 30,000 employees are a part of the organization. The staff is well trained and store managers ensure that all customer requests are looked into. However, in 2020 due to loss in business, a few stores had to be closed leading to a few layoffs.
Process:
John Lewis has got several business processes in place which help ensure the smooth operations of the retail brand. Processes involve dispatch of products & goods from manufacturing plants to warehouses of the company. Once at the warehouses, the products are sent to the retail stores for the customers to buy. The John Lewis website also allows customers to browse & shop online.
Physical Evidence:
John Lewis’ stores is the biggest physical evidence of the retail brand. The stores has a distinct look and feel and ambience, the store is customer friendly and makes it comfortable for the customer to shop. Loyalty cards, shopping bags, inhouse brands etc. also add to the physical presence of the brand. Hence this concludes the marketing strategy and marketing mix of John Lewis.
About John Lewis:
Way back more than a century ago a dynamic Britisher named John Spedan Lewis predicted that clothing business will have great business potential considering the style and the fashion craving of the Englishmen. It gave birth to the idea of branded clothing. Presently, John Lewis represents premium department store outlets having high reputation in the United Kingdom. Over the years, this business has transformed into a bigger gamut with Waitrose becoming a part of it. It has a unique business model in which the employees are the share holders. Today this business comprises of exclusive John Lewis stores (around forty) and more than four hundred Waitrose marts. The products are also available on the website of John Lewis.
It represents the price promise that John Lewis gives to its customers as a brand which is that the company is committed to never consciously charging higher prices for the same goods as competitors. Their strategy is based on three independent objectives which are Partners, Customers and Profit.
This article has been researched & authored by the Content & Research Team. It has been reviewed & published by the MBA Skool Team. The content on MBA Skool has been created for educational & academic purpose only.
Browse marketing strategy and 4Ps analysis of more brands similar to John Lewis. The Marketing Strategy & Mix section covers 4Ps and 7Ps of more than 800 brands in 2 categories.
Continue Reading:
The names and other brand information used in the Marketing Strategy & Mix section are properties of their respective companies. The companies are not associated with MBA Skool in any way.
