Want a brand fit for the future? Understand its past

 

We landed at Heathrow during a heatwave. An exhausted Australian wife, bemused daughter and remarkably compliant one year old followed their exuberant English dad through Terminal 3 to a waiting cab.

By the time we got to the flat it was 9am. Mother and daughter went for breakfast while I pushed my son along Shad Thames to get him asleep. And through Bermondsey. And Rotherhithe. It felt like I had walked to Greenwich and the little fucker was still sitting up, red eyed, staring at this green and pleasant land. And. Refusing. To. Go. Down.

Three long sleepless hours later I returned to the flat a beaten man. We had a lightweight pram. One that was good for getting through airports. But that was equally bad for sleepy time. “Go get a better pram” my wife told me.

Off I went into the bright July sunshine. In classic involvement theory, buying something that enables your child to sleep is up there with running water and condoms. I thought long and hard about where to go and opted for John Lewis on Oxford Street. Four brain cells of salience, 30 years of reassuring ads and a general prevailing positivity for the brand sent me there.

By the time I got to the 6th floor I’d work out the brand and model that would do the trick. Two ladies with thick London accents sat in a meeting room planning baby related inventory. They seemed busy but were happy to help. I explained what I wanted and why. One of them stood up and smiled. She showed me to the pram I should buy and explained why I did not want the one Google said I should buy. I expressed my undying gratitude and that I would take any colour. She asked for my address and I explained I needed it to go. She shook her head.

“Naw, we don’t do that. You pay here. But then we ship it out to you. About a week or so later.”

I explained I needed something now. She patted me in a patronising, but extremely comforting way. So comforting I actually didn’t want her to stop. But she did and disappeared through some double doors returning a minute later with a display model that she sold to me for less than I should have paid. Then cackled as I put the thing together in 14 seconds, folded the cardboard down and waved her goodbye. “

“Impressive,” she shouted at me. “Not my first rodeo,” I shouted back navigating through the lingerie section.

The John Lewis way

A month later, as fate would have it, I went to do some work in Maidenhead for the John Lewis Partnership – the company that owns both the titular department store and Waitrose. During a break in the schedule the leadership team arranged for me to have 90 minutes at its Heritage Centre around the corner. An effervescent woman in a fantastically patterned dress walked me through 160 years of retailing and properly blew my mind.

It was a story of textiles. Obviously of retailing. Of changing British tastes. Of supermarket food. And department store fashion. But the overriding theme of it all was kindness. Of a man who eventually made a lot of money and, rather than buy the early 20^th century equivalent of a super yacht, realised he had an extended family of employees to look after. And he started to do that. Elevating them from penury.

Making them partners in the business in a literal sense. Making sure they had holidays. In nice places. That did not cost a lot of money. In other words, treating employees as his equal. Imagine!

John Lewis the landlord? Welcome to brand extension nirvana

That man’s name wasn’t John Lewis. It was Spedan Lewis, John’s son. A big handsome man that took charge of the loss-making Peter Jones store in Chelsea and eventually turned it around. Only then coming back to the John Lewis on Oxford Street to apply the same kindness and business elan to that operation too.

As far as I could glean, Spedan was not a particularly religious man. He wasn’t giving back to his employees because of any theological impulse. He just seems to have been a lovely person that believed being good to people was a better way to do business. And whose life pretty much proves that precept to be true. “Capitalism’s answer to Communism” screamed a poster that I glimpsed on a dusty shelf of the archive.

I’ve been to corporate archives before. Many. They were usually in French or Italian because our Latin cousins have a much greater respect for the past than we brutish Anglo Saxons. Too many of us think the past is behind us. So, it was refreshing to find a British business that not only had a long, positive, treasured history but one that was clearly being used to guide its current thinking.

It’s an obvious move, but one so many brands ignore. We assume people from the past were somehow stupider than us. Monochrome morons with ancient hair. In reality, these men and women were just as smart and just as committed. And they faced just as tricky a set of decisions as us, often emerging with solutions that worked brilliantly. Spedan Lewis and his turnaround of Peter Jones being a perfect example.

Very often these ancient decisions can be useful to help us navigate the challenges of today. Clearly, you cannot just copy the approach of earlier decades. But if you distil the ethos and ideas of the past it can be a very real input into our current thinking. And that’s especially true for a brand that does things in a certain way.

There is no better way to understand what really makes a brand different than blowing away the cobwebs and looking at how it did things in the long, lingering run up to today. Great brands have not just been successful and lucky. They have been successful and lucky in a very specific, recurring kind of way.

Great brands have not just been successful and lucky. They have been successful and lucky in a very specific, recurring kind of way.

There is an absolute connection between the old grainy pictures of Spedan Lewis and his big kind face and the woman that sorted me out with a pram on a hot morning on Oxford Street. It’s a vibe you can pick up if you walk the floor of John Lewis. It’s not the best merchandised store. It’s certainly not the coolest. But whenever you bump into staff you get the warm, multicultural, cross-generational sensation that this is a very nice place to work. And that good people feel good about working here. And want you to feel good while you are here too. That’s not an attribute that every shopper is looking for. But I’d argue that in the cruel years ahead in the UK it’s one that will become more and more in demand.

The power of heritage

Of course, if you did not spend an hour wandering around the archive you would perhaps not pick up on the kindness of John Lewis that runs through the DNA of the brand. And therein lies one of the great challenges of brand management. I spent more than a decade working with LVMH and running executive sessions where senior people from one of the luxury giants’ brands would share their story and star products with other senior people from the company’s other brands. Without exception by the end of each session every person in the room, despite being wizened and experienced in the business of luxury, wanted to buy innumerable things from the brand in question. The power of heritage is extraordinary. It creates quite remarkable and persistent desire. And then a deeper more lasting appreciation for the brand.

Ideally, a good brand diagnosis encompasses a lot of sources. But if you asked me for the one or two most important inputs I’d always recommend loyalists interviews and then a long, indulgent study of a brand’s history. For those in charge of the brand it can be an ideal introduction to the challenges ahead and rich inspiration. It’s also a great way to ingratiate yourself with the existing team. But you must exhibit a more Latin approach to marketing, one in which the past guides the decisions that will be taken about the future.