John Lewis executive director Peter Ruis today raised the curtain on the return of the retailer’s famous ‘Never Knowingly Undersold’ price promise and put it front and centre of his plans to get the retailer back to the top.
In John Lewis’ new London HQ in Pimlico, Ruis stood in front of a room of waiting journalists with a broad smile on his face.
“Thank you all for coming,” he beamed. “Now I’m sure you’re all wondering why we’ve asked you here. Is it to break some more horrible news?
“No, it’s not. This is actually a really, really positive and really, really exciting piece of news.”
Turning to a large screen set, Ruis clicked a button: “As of Monday, we are bringing back Never Knowingly Undersold.”
The price match pledge, which is nearly as old as John Lewis itself, was unceremoniously dropped by previous management in February 2022. The reasons given at the time were that it had lost relevance at a time when customers were increasingly switching to online shopping and John Lewis was facing stiff competition from pureplays such as Amazon.
But now the promise is back and will be at the heart of everything John Lewis does for the rest of the year and beyond.
“This is not just the launch of a new price promise,” Ruis said. “This is our brand promise. It’s always been our brand, and it’s about the quality we offer, the service we offer, and the prices we offer.
“We have come up with a brand-new mechanism around how John Lewis will price match. Two years ago, when we dropped the promise, customers had gotten confused. Was it online? Was it in-store? How did it work? We’d lost the simple, easy mechanism. We had this incredible brand, Never Knowingly Undersold, but the price promise mechanism wasn’t working properly.”
So, to make it fit for the present and the future, Ruis and the team have partnered with tech firm Quicklizard to develop an AI-powered price-matching tool that will monitor 25 “industry leading” retailers across fashion, beauty, homewares, electricals and more in real time.
Ruis discussed why now is the right time to bring Never Knowingly Undersold back, whether it was a mistake to get rid of it in the first place, how long he and his team have been working on the new scheme and why it is just the tip of the iceberg in the “biggest period of customer-focused investment” in the 100-year history of the partnership.
Never Knowingly Undersold was dropped, at least in part, because of the costs. Are those costs coming back?
“The honest answer is, it’s a bit hard to know until we’ve had it go live and see how it goes. It wasn’t ever really a problem for us in terms of cost, but there was confusion around customers’ ability to use the mechanism.
“We weren’t in a situation where Never Knowingly Undersold was haemorrhaging us margin, or causing specific issues around our bottom line. The real issue was that we had a price mechanism that wasn’t fit for purpose in 2022 and needed changing.
“I don’t see a margin deficit problem with the relaunch, but doing it more clearly and simply, matching against 25 competitors, will make it much easier for customers and for us to understand how we can operate it.”
So was it a mistake to drop the price promise in the first place?
“That’s a difficult question. The price promise as it was at the time wasn’t fit for purpose. We had to pause it, to update it. We’ve done that process now and we have a pricing mechanism that’s fit for the present and for the future.
“The old promise was based too much in a pre-internet world, in a pre-omnichannel world and I think it was too much about a local, store-to-store definition for customers. So it had to change and be updated.”
How long has this been in the works? Has it been driven by you, or was it in progress under your predecessor?
“I think it’s always been a debate and a discussion within the Partnership. Never Knowingly Undersold is our brand. We’ve had it for 100 years. But certainly, we sat down very early on with the idea of bringing it back.
“I joined in January, and we were discussing, debating it. Those discussions became even stronger in February. I’d say from about then we as a team began thinking that this would become really important, but we needed to find a way of modernising it and we’ve been doing that for the last six months.
“So, yeah, we’ve done this at pace. It’s really happened in an extreme fast track.”
Do you think that without the promise, John Lewis had lost the trust of its consumers on price and value?
“It’s not that they didn’t trust us for value. It’s more that when we removed the price promise they automatically assumed that meant all of our prices went up.
“Every brand has its clear outliers in terms of how customers perceive them. We perform very strongly in quality and on service perception. But our price perception is lower and has deteriorated because of that automatic assumption that when the price promise was removed, our prices went up.
“That wasn’t necessarily true, but the discipline of having a price promise internally gives customers that assurance on price.”
Was this discussed with executive chair-elect Jason Tarry, and is he on board?
“We had a very long conversation about it, in fact, and he’s really excited about it and very supportive. He loves the fact that we’ve done it.
“It’s worth saying that the current chair and the chief executive, Sharon [White] and Nish [Kankiwala], are also very excited and supportive. Sharon, Nish and Jason are all on the journey in different ways, but everyone’s 100% behind it and loving what we’re doing.”
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