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 asASOS 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
• 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)

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