John Lewis scores sales-driving hit with Christmas ad

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Nov 25, 2019

The John Lewis (and Waitrose) Christmas ad starring animated dragon Excitable Edgar has scored a hit with consumers with independent analysis of its impact showing it to be the strongest of the retailer’s festive campaigns since Monty the Penguin in 2014.

Analysis by market research firm System 1 for marketing publication The Drum showed the John Lewis ad topping its rankings with the viewer response “showing the creative to be capable of driving both a short-term sales spike and long-term brand equity”.

System 1 has been looking at viewers’ emotional responses to campaigns and testing the speed of brand recognition from the ads. On this basis, in the week prior to the John Lewis release, Joules had also topped the chart with its Wallace & Gromit Christmas commercial.

This time, John Lewis scored 5.8 with a powerful emotional response that System 1 says is an indication of a brand’s long-term growth potential. 

System 1’s Orlando Wood said the ad resonates because it has “a sense of time and place, characters, betweenness, knowing looks, music and scenes unfolding.”

That said, not all fashion-linked brands did well. The worst performer this week was Loewe with its An Otter’s Tale ad getting a star rating of just 1.1 stars. However, given its luxury positioning, Loewe needs to appeal to a specific set of consumers rather than the more general group being used for testing here.