A CMO Masterclass - how John Lewis redefined emotional advertising - Craig Inglis

0:28Welcome back everybody to the Uncensored CMO. customer experience. He's worked at Virgin as well as John Lewis and now he's at The Entertainer. I want to catch up with Craig and find out what it takes to be a great CMO and what are the tips and tricks that he can pass on so you can be a better marketer. It's a great fun this episode, there's lots you'll get out of it. Here's my interview with Craig. Craig Ingalls, welcome to the show. Thank you, it's great to be here. Before we get into John Lewis, tell everyone a little bit about your marketing past. How did you get into marketing, you know, what kind of jobs have you done on your journey to this point?

0:56Well, like many marketeers, I sort of fell into it, not quite knowing what I was doing. And so I did study marketing, though. My first job was at a business called, was called Thompson Holidays, now called TUI, was my sort of apprenticeship in marketing. And I joined TUI, I remember being excited by two things. One, that there was a picture of a desert island on the front of the careers brochure. There was brochures back then. And secondly, that their purpose was all about creating dreams for the customers. And I thought, I love a bit of that. It sounds like fun. And that sort of carried me through my career.

1:29I'm a sucker for a purpose. And so when I left there, I went traveling a bit and then I joined Virgin. I saw Richard Branson hanging out at the front of a train and talking about how he was going to bring Virgin Atlantic to the rails and revolutionize the UK's railways. And I was very taken with that. And then I joined John Lewis, which is all about a better way of doing business. and again very taken with that and then finally i worked for sage and and they're all about championing small businesses which i also loved so so for me it's been about purpose all the way through but that's that so i've only worked for four brands which i think is relatively less lower than the normal for a career of sort of 30 years or so there's some very well known and some fun brands by the sounds of it yeah well we'll get into a bit more particularly on john of course because i i know dying to get into that and talk a little bit about that um you and i were doing a panel the other day and one thing that struck me in the debate we were having in the panel was quite how open you were about things that had gone well and things that had gone less well so i thought i'd just mix it up a little bit in this episode and ask you um tell me a time when it's not gone so well from a marketing point of view and what happened yeah i mean we were talking in that panel about some of the big creative moments at john lewis and and in particular i was talking about the very first big campaign which was called always a woman uh which wasn't a Christmas ad actually it was it was I think it was in May uh but it was the first big one that got traction and it was an absolute disaster from a production point of view uh there were lots of bumps in the road we hadn't really ever done a big you know really emotional campaign before so we're kind of finding our feet we're quite early in the relationships as well with Adam and Eve and and and so I think that that was probably the source of the the the angst that that kind of permeated through the shoots.

3:13To bring that to life, we basically shot the ending three times. We could not agree on the ending to the point that a week before it was due on air, literally a week before it was due on air, I remember being in my garden on the phone and we had no ad, we had no director and no production company because we'd all fallen out. So it was resolved by bringing Dougal Wilson, who I ended up working with on multiple ads, and a company called Blink, I got them to my local pub and we had a couple of drinks and a luncheon and in that lunch we sorted out the challenges we had and the following day we reshot the ending down my local park and myself and James Murphy, who's the founder of Adam and Eve, were there as basically runners because we had to bring this together really quickly.

4:05So we kind of pulled it out of the bag in the end but that was an almighty disaster in terms of the production but actually it became probably our biggest success, at least at that time. It was the one that kind of started it all off. So yeah, and there's lots of stories like that. You know, these sorts of levels of creativity, they are filled with tension. And I think actually in many ways, that's where the kind of magic comes from. It's amazing, isn't it, how many times that some of these situations end up like being the best outcomes, aren't they? Sometimes, you know, are born through the...

4:35I remember probably mine... It doesn't feel like that at the time. It doesn't, does it? I know it feels like a disaster, but often ends up being good. I think the most challenging situation I was in once, I was working on, do you know the liqueur di Serrano Amaretto? You know, the kind of almond liqueur. It's beautiful, isn't it? Guilty pleasure. It is. It's lovely, isn't it? Particularly Christmas, it's really popular. I was a young brat. I said it was my first brand manager job. So I was probably like 23, 24, something like this, trying to make my mark desperate to do something cut through. And this is back in 2002.

5:06And I was working with the London Underground. And I was inspired by when you go into a supermarket, you know, you get the bakery smell, like you get the waft of like fresh bread and you go, oh, that's amazing. I'll wander over and get some bread. And I had this idea and I was going to waft the smell of amaretto through the underground. And I'd done this deal with the underground's impact team and we'd put these scent emitters and I'd work with some perfume houses to get exactly the scent of amaretto. A wafting strategy. Exactly, a wafting strategy. And I'd taken all the billboards as you go down the escalators.

5:39This was before they were digital, of course. Actually, they were actually billboards. And then we had little sampling teams. So basically, you'd go through the underground, you'd smell it, you'd see it, and you'd taste it. And I just thought this was genius. Sounds great. I know, exactly. I was just like, this is my Christmas mark. There is a buck coming. Yeah, there is a buck coming, actually. This is my kind of master Christmas plan. And I'd spent six months and got all the sign-off for it. Everything was ready. And it was due to go live on the Monday. Now, they say timing is everything because this is 2002.

6:09And on the Monday, there was a potential terror attack because we're about to go to war with Iraq. And the Home Office presented some new guidelines to the public. Front page of The Sun, that morning on the Monday, 9am, was the public are warned to be vigilant for the threat of a cyanide attack in London, in the London Underground. Please look out for the smell of almonds. Oh, no. and de Sirono smells of almonds. You could not make that. I know, you couldn't make it up, could you? So I was at a trade show. I mean, I was like, you know, junior brand manager at a trade show, giving out samples or whatever.

6:45And then I picked up my phone at lunch and it was just off the hook with journalists going, can you comment on what's going on? And then I discovered, so I was in all these papers. And I was even made, have I got news for you? At the weekend, it was the story. Oh, I did end up in the front of the Daily Mail as well. I was going to say, I think you've got history. in this one as well i do i've forgotten about i've kind of tried to get out of my brain but uh i yes i i in what became known as beige gate uh at john lewis i was misquoted i must say from a room i innocuously was presenting an agency uh on our strategy and i think i was only maybe a year or so into john lewis and so basically i was given my reflections in a year in and what i said was is that john lewis had been known for being beige for for quite a long time and actually that's not what I saw.

7:30I saw a business that was much more colorful, that was rich and was kind of very design led, very entrepreneurial in all its aspects. And so my job as marketing director was to bring it to life. So, you know, I was very much coming from the right place. Unfortunately, the headline, which I think was in marketing week, said, Ingalls says John Lewis is beige. And it was pretty disparaging. And then Janet Street Porter, who's a big John Lewis fan, picked it up and basically called from my head and it made its way onto the front page and also india night did the same i think in the times and so it became this huge huge furore this innocuous comment at an agency one morning did you not know there were journalists in the room then i mean how did it get out i did actually ask no so i did say look is this chatham house rules and other journalists and the answer was no so i didn't check the list now i should have checked the list but uh i have checked every listens and any talk i ever do i always assume the worst now i always assume it could end up in the in the daily mail and because you sort of think no one's interested but they are they are interested they're interested in brands like the serrano or john lewis you know brands because you put your head above the parapet when you when you start to tell the story of these brands and inevitably that means that you you become part of the story if something goes awry and i think particularly for brands like john lewis who are kind of national treasure brands aren't they where everyone has an affinity for them and they're very high profile like they own them they do it feels like it's our brand and how dare you mess with our brand and and you know so when john knows customers when they talk about uh john lewis they they talk about it as the mothership yeah uh that's that's an often used phrase you know and uh so john betteman was was famed for saying that you know if there was a nuclear war you would you should go to john lewis because nothing bad ever happens there and and so when you've got an institution like that you know you you you've got to be very careful about how you talk about it and criticize it at your peril and that was certainly not my intent but anyway there you go you live and land now you talked at the beginning about you've had four stints uh so you've had quite long stints as a as a cmo asking for a friend really on this question which is like what's the secret to surviving a long tenure as a cmo we've all read the stories about how short the cmo tenure is i managed to get myself fired twice in a year so i'd be quite interested in the answers this one But tell me, what's the secret to longevity and making a big impact in the long term?

9:52It's a really good question. I want to hear how you got fired twice in a year. But, well, in no small part, as I said earlier, I joined the businesses that I joined quite intentionally. So the purpose, at least for me, was really important. And having that affinity between what I believe in and the business that I'm working for is really important. And so I had that affinity in all of those brands. And in actually three out of the four cases, when I joined, I joined as part of a kind of bigger team, a bigger restructure. And a year in, most of who I joined with had gone and I was still there. And so I kind of got quite resilient.

10:28And that resilience was drawn from the belief in the mission, belief in what we're doing. if I think about particularly if I tell you about Virgin Trains you know I joined a Virgin company or so I thought and as I said I was seduced by Richard Branson everything that went with that what I actually joined was a you know an under-invested part of the civil service and it was the first Virgin business that wasn't a startup and so here we were walking into a culture where it was about as far from a Virgin business as you could imagine and and here we were kind kind of full of razzmatazz, trying to turn it into sort of this virgin entrepreneurial culture.

11:04And that was never going to happen overnight. And indeed, investing in rolling stock and redesigning trains and redesigning the track, it's never going to be done overnight. So we were totally unrealistic about how long it would take. So my belief in it, belief in the mission, was what saw me through some really quite dark times. And I don't know how far back you remember, but at that time, Network Rail was a company called Railtrack, and it went bust. and as a consequence the the whole rail network went into meltdown over overnight literally overnight and so we were suddenly faced with these 20 mile an hour speed limits which caused all the timetables to fail and so on so we were basically never out of the press for all the wrong reasons and i stuck with it because it mattered and because i cared about it and i believed we could we could get there and we did and and so you know similarly to john lewis i really believed in this idea of the better way of doing business and what i what i entered was a business that had that at its heart but there was no conversation about brand brand wasn't even a word that really people used and there was a sort of collective lack of confidence lack of understanding about the role that marketing could play and so whilst i'd arrived in this amazing business i could see the opportunity to drive positive change by shining a light on everything everything that was special about john lewis and and that's what we did over the course of time and it does take time and so you know i think if you're really going to make an impact a really serious impact you've got to give it that sort of time and and and it's hard to make a difference in a couple of years never mind six months i know exactly three months i know i think mark writson said recently that that you if you really want uh to cut through with the brand strategy you need 10 years of consistency yeah i think that's about right there's a lot of evidence to support that actually i mean you know again if you look at the system on database the brands that have done the best over the longest periods you take like aldi with kevin the carrot for example you know they've consistently done the same thing year in year out and and learned from it and grown very very successfully you're i mean there's a lot to be said for consistency it's very very underrated i mean famously we we didn't change the john knows christmas strategy over the the 10 years or so that was running it you know and that was very intentional i think some people thought it was laziness and it really wasn't you know so we uh we absolutely poked at it and and were open-minded to change it and and And every year we went around the block on whether we should change it.

13:23But it was right. It was right for the reason. I want to ask you about the CMO role, perception versus reality. Because I guess most people think CMO spends their time out making ads and meeting their agency for lunch on a Friday. But the reality of a CMO role is very different, I think, to what maybe people perceive it. I know in my limited experience, I've often found the jump quite a big one. Because suddenly you're on a board, you're actually not talking about marketing. I remember when I was first on the board, the marketing would be about 10 % of the topics we'd discuss. And very often the last topic, we'd be talking about the factory and the insurance and what we're going to pay rises for the following year.

14:00It'd be all those kind of operational topics. So the actual role is quite different, I think, often to the one people may perceive from the outside. Has that been your experience? Yeah, absolutely. So all the stuff we're just talking about now, the John Lewis campaign, it's about, I don't know, 5 % of the job, max. And the reality is I spent about 60 % of my time with the board talking about board stuff, running the business, everything from warehouses to lorries and the loo's and the shops and escalators and everything in between, you know. And so you have to have a point of view as a board member.

14:31You've got to park your functional responsibility and have a point of view on how you run the business, I think. So to some extent, your question is answered by what's a board member? And a board member is someone who has interest and knowledge and a perspective. I mean, legally, you have to have a point of view, right? that's in there in your sort of responsibilities and as a director and so and so that's a big part of it but i think in terms of being a cmo on a board there's a number of things that you that you can bring that are a bit different to perhaps some of the other board members and i think i'd probably sum them up maybe three things so first of all typically not always but typically and certainly this is the case for me is that I sort of there's you have credibility both commercially and sort of analytically but also creatively and intuitively and it's the combination of those two things I think which typically define a CMO has been a bit different to maybe some of the other voices around the table so and you dial that up and dial that down depending on whatever it is that you're talking about and and certainly if I think about uh the boards I've been part of that that would be the thing that I would particularly bring is that and particularly that intuitive side and be prepared to just challenge the kind of status quo a bit.

15:42So that's really important. I think secondly, customer obsession is really important. So, you know, I have always had a sort of intuitive feel for what matters to customers and I really care about it. And so I can get very passionate about it. And when I joined the John Lewis board, marketing and customer was pretty low down the agenda and tended to be the bit at the end in truth. And we focused on big operational, functional or financial matters, all of which are really important, of course, but I'm proud to say that we changed that over the course of time and the customer became the first thing that we talked about in that board.

16:16So, you know, incredibly important. And then maybe the third thing it defines a CMO is a bit different is storytelling. Typically, as you well know, you know, there's a lot of opinions about marketing because everyone is a consumer. And so inevitably, you know, that's one of the great strengths about what we do. It's one of the reasons why we do it, but it's also one of the things that holds us back. And so I think as a board member, you've got to be able to engage. You've got to be able to take people with you and tell the story of why you're doing what you're doing, why you're doing it on behalf of customers, and what it would do for change for the business.

16:48And not just in the board, but beyond, right? So I think you could argue maybe every board member has to do that in some way, but particularly CMOs, that's a fundamental ask of what we do. That's very solid advice. Actually, to your second point, one of my favourite Mark Ritson quotes is, the job of the CMO is to represent the consumer where decisions are getting made. And I think that's absolutely spot on. And I think if I look at my most effective parts of my career, it's been when I've been closest to my customer and best able to articulate. Because if you say, I've just come back from, you know, talking to the customer on the customer care line, or I've just been out seeing our customers, or I've just been spending a day in trade, you know, the credibility it gives you to speak on behalf of the people that you're serving is enormous.

17:31But that's how you cut through all the politics, all the board nonsense. Every board's got that, right? Every business has got that. You cut through by turning to the customer. You know, you reference the customer, and suddenly you take all the heat out of it, all the politics disappears, because it's not opinion anymore. It's fact. It's fact. And as long as you can connect doing the right thing for customers and how that connects to driving a great commercial result, then you're onto a winner every time. And I think, to your point a minute ago, the thing I always say to teams is, I need to believe that when we aren't all together as a marketing team, that any one of you, no matter your seniority in the team, will be able to represent the customer in the room and be prepared to be the lone voice in the room.

18:12Be prepared to flow against the tide of what's being said, the group think in the room, and do the right thing. And to do that takes some confidence. It does. And so building that capability is really important. And I think Link said, actually, the other unique thing I've noticed is as well is that the CMOs uniquely positioned to take a longer term view than most of the other functions. Because most functions are, did we deliver on time in full? Did we hit the profit number? You know, what's our employee satisfaction results? You know, they're very, very in the moment, aren't they? They're just a snapshot in time.

18:43But I think the CMO is building the plan to look long term, thinking about where we're going next, thinking about what we're going to do next. And that's a unique role, really. Only the CEO is going to have probably a longer term view than the CMO. Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, albeit I don't think it's exclusive. If you can get the right relationships on a board like that, the whole board should hold that tension between short and long term and hold that very consciously. And I've been lucky enough to mainly work for businesses that are private. And so your ability to do that, particularly John Lewis, because it's employee-owned, that ability to kind of focus on the bigger picture and do the right thing for the long term, sometimes at the cost of the short term was something actually took great pride in so and i would say that was you know from the ceo down and famous for it as well isn't it you're well known for taking that position um i'd go at writing the four p's for the cmo so um you know which i ended up with people planning politics and persuasion because actually if i look at the time i spent on you know as a cmo the amount of time you're thinking about people in terms of organization roles that kind of thing planning ahead uh you're constantly planning ahead politics I think it's one of those things no one really likes to admit but you know you need to sort of be able to navigate politics and persuasion is a lot of kind of persuading people internally externally you know to get things make things happen and there's an art to all that isn't there I tell you what you're a brave man rewriting the four Ps he's not going to be happy with this he doesn't like the rewriting of the four Ps and quite right too I'd probably I mean I think they're probably the same thing but I'd boil it down to two things I think you know So first, you've got to set a clear, compelling vision.

20:22You've got to get people excited about where we're going. And then boil that down into clear objectives. But that's the one really big thing you can do. And the second is create the conditions for people to thrive. And that's multifaceted, but it covers probably the other three Ps you identify. Broadly, it's culture, right? So what kind of places do we want to work in? what kind of relationships do we need to have for that to happen what does great communication look like all of that I think becomes the job and you know I think about the time when I moved onto the John Lewis board and I'd sort of like like most of us I'd grown up and been rewarded for being a master of my craft which is relatively narrow and deep and then suddenly you find yourself in my case I had 600 people working for me and you're a master of nothing and so So I remember feeling a little bit lost, you know, because I had six, seven people in my leadership team all been chosen to kind of do their job, including a new marketing director, an amazing woman called Becky Brock, who I recruited to replace me.

21:28And so suddenly the thing that I'd been anchored to was no longer my thing. And then it took me a while, took me about a year. I'm a bit slow in the uptake, but I realized that actually the job is the two things I've just said. it's like i'm the two things that only i can do is set the vision and really build the culture like and and a huge part of the job is communication 40 40 of the job i would say um so yeah so it took me a while to get my head around that that is such such good advice i know exactly what you're talking about i've been in that position where it's weird that you're not making decisions on packaging or not signing off the brief or not you know kind of you're like let me in and then when it gets presented back you're sat there going well this is what I'd have done what do I do now?

22:11Do I coach or do I feed back or what happens? You do have to decide the things that are worth getting in on and someone asked me just the other day where do you sit on the continuum of micromanagement at one end and complete empowerment at the other and I think the reality is we all move along that continuum and there are some things like say John Lewis Christmas where I would step in in much more detail because the the stakes are high. And that's not to say I didn't have trust. I absolutely did. But, you know, there's some things where you just have to be on the hook for the detail. So choosing those moments is everything.

22:46Was it Richard Branson that said his advice was hire people best than you than get out of their way? Have I made that up? Was that a quote from him? I think we can go with it. Yeah, it sounds good. I don't think he would say. Along with... So hiring really, really good people to do the job. I mean, I'm such a believer in that. You're only as good as the people around you. I mean, you know, totally. Bit of a cliche, but it's so true and you know i realized that in that very team i just described that you know the only way we were going to be able to really deliver for the customer at john lose and this new team was through exactly that through having brilliant a brilliant brilliantly diverse team i mean diversity in its broader sense around that table with real tension you know real healthy creative tension because you always get to a better result and the only way that you can have that tension and for it not to cause a spiral is if you've got the right relationships and relationships which have implicit trust in them and i think as the leader that that's the the job that only you can do is to is to create the time the space and the energy for those relationships to be built and and out of that comes the magic it's i mean it's such a you know it's a very meandering bumpy thing it's not it's not straightforward there's no straight line to it but that's the job that's that's what we do now he talks about being in all the detail for the John Lewis Christmas ads.

23:57I thought I'd put you to the test here. So I've jumped on the system one database and pulled off a few face traces. I don't like the sound. Exactly. Look at the emotional response to some of your campaigns. And I thought I'd see if you can guess by the emotional response, which campaign we're talking about. So I can't even remember the ads. I'll put a couple in front of you and then we can discuss them. So this top one here, see if I can explain to everyone listening what we're looking at here, is the grey area is neutrality. The lovely green area down here is happiness. So in this example... I mean, it's black and white, John.

24:30I know, exactly. So we're cutting costs on unsense to see it. So for anyone watching, there's our pointless to cameras where you can see the black and white. It's a new invention. It's like, guess the colour. So the green is the block in the middle. So green is the block in the middle. So what you've got here is about half the people feel happy by the end. You've got this lovely gradual rise in happiness throughout. Which ad do you think that one is? So there's no drop? No drop. It's constant rise throughout. always a woman yes well done there you go so so all your re-editing and all your work down the pub paid off at the end so nice nice peak end yeah that's great so that's a good one is that a good shape is that system one that's that's that's very good it's very good not quite as good as right the the next two and i've had to put them together actually because there are two ads that you've made that have both followed a very similar pattern and these are the two highest scoring in there's not a lot between them in the results the two highest scoring ads on our database of yours and what again for the people listening what we've got here is we've got very little neutrality so most people are feeling something throughout biggest challenge by the way make people feel something most advertising doesn't right so number one challenge now at the top here we've got blue again can you guess i mean you know yeah they go shades of gray at the moment anyway blue and blue is sadness so in both these ads what you've done is about halfway through you've created quite a serious amount of jeopardy for the audience and that's quite a lot of sadness that's that's a serious amount of sadness now what you've done very well in both is you've resolved it very quickly to the extent that you see this enormous happiness at the end now that and that that's i mean that's very very rare to get you're talking about 80 75 80 the audience by the end are feeling nothing but happiness and both of them also have an element of surprise as in the final third as you do the uh as you do the big reveal okay so can you guess which two i mean that that construct is what we try to get on every ad uh the kind of jeopardy and then the resolution and so on so but we did it to varying degrees of success uh i would say uh monty the penguin and edgar the dragon maybe the long way but but those those i think are the ones yeah exactly right exactly right so yeah monster penguin edgar yes yeah yeah so which is which is which you can keep the job well actually interesting we're getting it we're getting into the the micro details now the um the slightly more extreme one was edgar so edgar in fact at system one we use edgar as an example of story arc or the best way to use negative tension because it's an interesting insight is actually that most people when they introduce jeopardy or sadness into an ad never quite resolve it because negative emotions hang around a bit longer than positive emotions so what we find is people do you know let's frighten you frighten you frighten you and then right at the end will make you feel happy and then of course people are still left with that negative emotion yeah what you did brilliantly though is you you kind of created this happiness to begin with you then have the twist but then the resolution was so strong at the end and edgar did that you know most spectacularly oh that's good great to hear i'm sure you must have we must have seen that at the time but but i don't remember it the the i bet the audience think i knew these in advance by the way and i didn't but funnily enough on edgar that script was presented two or three over two or three years and a couple of times we rejected i rejected it because we just weren't happy that the resolution was strong enough i mean if you think remember the ad just describe the resolution because actually it's a very clever resolution isn't it to the yeah no but before the resolution there's that there's a point where he takes himself off on his own and is in a darkened room and doesn't want to be with his friends and we're just like this is this is this is not christmas this is not good let's be a little dragon and i I can't remember what the original resolution was, but it wasn't strong enough.

28:14And so what we ended up with was that the flames that he couldn't control became the lighting of a Christmas pudding at this huge feast. And it was just this lovely sort of reveal at the end. And then there's kind of a bit of comedy moment when everyone relaxes because they think they're about to get flamed. So there's a bit of humor in there at the end, which kind of lightens the whole moment. So that kind of makes it. But had we not had that, it just doesn't work. So yeah, I mean, and same on Monty. and all the others, I think. Yeah, now obviously we look back now with nostalgia looking at John Lewis ads.

28:46And I mean, everywhere I go, if I mention John Lewis, everyone knows how synonymous John Lewis is with Christmas and emotional advertising. But if you go back to the beginning of your journey, how did you say, because retailers are famously rational, aren't they? And focused on service and price and value and those kinds of things. How did you kind of get the strategy away within the organisation? I'd say in every job I've ever done, and no different, John Lewis is about the customer, it's about the customer insight. And so we had a big old piece of customer insight when I joined. And bear in mind, as I said earlier, this is a business that wasn't known for its marketing.

29:22It actually had a pretty bumpy relationship with marketing. And I'd only had a team for a few years when I joined. And there was almost an innate sense of being a bit anti-marketing in a way, because the kind of unwritten rule within the business is don't over promote yourself um you know if you get the product right people will come and and and that was that was pretty pretty strong feeling within the business and so when we were kind of building this the strategy uh it was really important to kind of root it in in kind of really clear customer insight which was that whilst many people would say to me i love john lewis and there would be you know talk about the stories of why they love john lewis and it typically went back to being a kid and getting school uniform or the first baby or first flat or whatever actually in reality when we when you when we broke down the brand equity it was nearly all about so so john lear's did better than its competitors on uh things like reliability and trust and delivery right so things that were rational uh drivers on emotional drivers uh did a lot less well so no better than its competitors and then and you know so the way i looked at that was like oh hold on John Lewis sells things that you basically either put on your body or in your home.

30:37So they are inherently emotional. It's a business run by its partners where they give this kind of lovely, warm service at its best. And you remember the people. All the cues come from the people. So that's inherently emotional. And we're creating desire. This is a department store. There's nothing you need from John Lewis. It's all about want. And so we've got to create this emotional bondedness and become known for that. And so that was the beginnings of the strategy, was rooted in that insight. And it carried on through. And I'm glad to say that we changed that relationship massively. And bondedness became the driver of greater frequency and higher share of wallet.

31:15So, you know, it was a commerciality at the end of it all. But that was the fundamentals. Yeah, that's good there, because you've got clear vision. You've got some good data to back it, you know, to base it on the other big good understanding. I've got a listener question, actually. So Claire messaged me last night and she was saying, any advice for selling in bold, creative ideas to sort of very rational CEOs, CFOs? You know, because every marketer wants to make that kind of famous, award-winning, impactful kind of creative work. But often you've got quite a few decision makers around you that may not see the world in the same kind of way.

31:46So what advice would you give to someone in her position, selling in a big idea? To some extent, I think we were just talking about it. So I would say you have to start with solid insight. You've got to start with really solid data that tells the story of why this is, what's the change that you're trying to affect and what's the customer behavior change you should expect to see within the business. And then what's the commercial outcome as a consequence of changing that behavior? That's the thread, the story you've got to tell. Before you get anywhere near a creative idea, that's the story. You've got to get clear on that and therefore what's the need, what's the exam question if you like.

32:23So getting clarity on that, I think then leads to, right, so therefore the resolution is, this is how we're going to solve the problem. And I think being clear on roles as you go through a creative process is incredibly important. And so I would say investing time upstream with the CEO and others so that you get really clear on that brand strategy, get really clear on how you're going to measure it, what success looks like, and be involving up front means that you have a lot less pain later. Because the last thing you need is a CEO or anyone else stepping in at the point where you're about to deliver.

32:59Oh, it's a horrible moment, isn't it? Where you get quite far through a process and then you do the review and you go, oh, this isn't going to work. I don't really like it. And actually, to be honest, I've had loads of those. I had that on Monty the Penguin. I remember vividly presenting it to a room and had a really pretty bad response. Actually, no response. Like you said earlier. To Monty, really? The last thing you want is a vanilla response. And I remember just getting, it was a really flat room. And the CEO just saying, I don't really get it. And that's a moment where I had to hold my course.

33:29And luckily up front, we'd already had the conversation, the difficult conversation that says, okay, well, look, who's on the hook here? Who's got the decision? Particularly if you disagree. And you have to have that conversation. And it was very clear. I was lucky to have several CEOs at John Lewis, all of whom said, look, I know I'm not the best person to make creative decisions. Therefore, you're on the hook. now there's obviously some jeopardy that comes with that personally as well but that was in a way the making of those campaigns because there was a relatively small team and a consistent team both within the business and in the in our agencies who who made the work and we all knew absolutely clearly who was on the hook and so you know in the end you you know you've got to make the decisions and so the general ceo would would see it the day before the public and you know that became a thing but that did mean that i had moments like that with monty and so and so the day after i remember pushing the button and and there was no actual button but we the proverbial button and and and actually you know being pretty terrified that that maybe that room was representative of how it was going to be yeah in the end it was far from that but i love your question about if we disagree who decides yeah that's really good because because then you're going to take away the ambiguity up front when you get to that decision making point you've already you've already taken that problem away, haven't you, in terms of what happens next.

34:50The other thing, actually, I've noticed as well in my career is some of the most creative, bold work has been done where it's been a much smaller budget or there hasn't been as much at stake. And you can almost play. It's almost like the bigger the stakes, the more you have to involve people and the more risk there is, quote unquote. But sometimes you can play in the margins a bit to almost prove something and then, you know, then scale it up from there. That's another of route through i think that can work yeah you definitely and i think i think particularly i mean it's with with campaigns or indeed any innovation you know so from from for quite a few years i ran uh john lewis.com i run i run an e-commerce team now at the entertainer and so a lot of the work we do is is iterative it's we we have we we have agile teams and we we run in sprints and we build small and we get in front of customers mvps and and we iterate and that sort of test and learn thinking, I think if you can bring that into other parts of the business, including marketing, it's no bad thing, you know, I think, and learn as you go and be prepared to kind of change course means that you're not betting the farm every time.

35:57And sometimes you have to do that too, but you're not betting the farm and you can learn as you go. It's really important, I think. Yeah. Now, I really felt your emotion there when you talk about presenting Monty to the room. Of course, Monty was one of the most successful ads John Lewis ever made. How did you then assess the impact on the business as a result of that campaign afterwards well it was multifaceted and you know every board i've ever worked as part of it has wanted a kind of a single measure of of success and and in my experience it just doesn't exist and so i think most retailers at least we use the combination of three things really so sort of the the kind of we had the immediacy of digital analytics which is which is great it's you know it's there and then it's So, you know, great commercial litmus test for how you're doing, along with, you know, things like social listening.