Chris Lee

John Lewis is one of Britain’s most iconic stores and last September re-launched its JohnLewis.com/Fashion site to coincide with its autumn fashion lines. The company wanted to come up with a social media plan that would help it become a major player in the UK online fashion market.

London-based communications agency Cohn & Wolfe was brought onboard to help generate awareness for John Lewis’ online offering and help it compete more effectively against established online specialist fashion retailers such as ASOS and Net-a-porter. To put it in context, prior to the launch of JohnLewis.com/Fashion, just six per cent of sales of fashion items came via the company’s website.

Cohn & Wolfe’s first challenge was educate the fashion media, online influencers and fashion conscious consumers that it had an attractive online fashion offering. Two key objectives were agreed; to position John Lewis as a major player in the online fashion arena using social media, and to drive traffic to JohnLewis.com/Fashion and increase sales.

Spreading the word

Cohn & Wolfe’s digital team analysed conversations around fashion and identified the key influencers – bloggers, journalists and industry insiders. The team then measured their influence via metrics such as in-bound links, traffic and author background. Cohn & Wolfe also identified a group of ‘mummy bloggers’ who were increasingly influential in providing style advice to an important audience segment; John Lewis’ core customer group of 30-45 year-old women.

The digital team then also determined the digital footprint of key media by measuring their presence on Twitter, blogs, Facebook and Flickr. This gave Cohn & Wolfe multiple entry points and increased opportunities to extend the conversation about John Lewis’ fashion re-launch during the outreach phase, explained Steve Parker, director of digital media at Cohn & Wolfe UK.

Execution

Cohn & Wolfe created e-vouchers to encourage users to browse the site and purchase items, make style recommendations and share them with their own personal networks. Influencers were contacted via their preferred medium and using this strategy Parker said that John Lewis was able to showcase more than 200 fashion and beauty brands.

One-to-one interviews were conducted with key influencers and when one in particular – online fashion community Shopstyle.co.uk - began sending significant traffic to JohnLewis.com/Fashion, the team created a unique social media contest specifically for that site.

Bags of coverage

Cohn & Wolfe estimates that in total the campaign reached more than 1.6 million people and achieved positive coverage from 86 per cent of the digital influencers identified at the outset.

A 250 per cent increase in positive social media conversations containing the keywords “John Lewis” and “fashion”, exceeding targets. The ShopStyle competition resulted in 350 “looks”, the site’s most successful competition to date. 248 tweets and re-tweets were achieved on Twitter, resulting in a potential 132,622 influencers engaged via the microblogging platform.

Most importantly for John Lewis, fashion sales grew by 385 per cent and order value by a fifth (21 per cent).

“We are thrilled by the results of this campaign,” said Louise Cooper, senior manager, Corporate and Branch PR for John Lewis. “The Cohn & Wolfe digital team went through a meticulous planning and insights phase which led to a highly creative and effective strategy for engaging core customers, online influencers and getting a notoriously discerning fashion forward audience to successfully re-appraise the John Lewis brand. The campaign has exceeded our communications objectives and achieved fully measureable business outcomes. It has set the standard for all future social media activity.”