Two years after it ditched the statement price promise, John Lewis is “never knowingly undersold” once more. This caught our news-scouring eyes at Antidote for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, the announcement was made as part of the start of the retailer’s marketing push for Christmas. It also revealed some details about its Christmas 2024 ad campaign, but we couldn’t quite bring ourselves to go into that in early September.
Secondly, and perhaps even more interestingly for a comms tech agency like Antidote, it was revealed that part of the reason the price pledge was ditched in the first place was because it entailed “staff relying on pencils, spreadsheets, and trips to other shops to keep track of rivals' prices”. The new scheme will instead use AI to match prices to 25 other retailers.
But what does this new data-driven price matching promise mean for consumers?
What does the data say?
- Of the major UK supermarkets, Ocado claims to price match the highest number of products, promising to match Tesco on over 10,000 items.
- The new John Lewis price promise extends to online sales for the first time, as the trend away from high street retailing continues. PwC data revealed a net loss of 5,000 stores last year.
- John Lewis’s announcement is part of a recent trend, with Morrisons, Asda, Tesco and Sainsbury’s all either introducing or expanding their price match policies in 2024.
Despite all the major UK supermarkets offering some kind of price matching scheme, there are still significant disparities in the cost of shopping. By tailoring which items are matched and which are discounted regularly, each retailer can feasibly claim to compete on price.
Analysis from independent consumer champion Which? found that Aldi is still the cheapest supermarket across its averaged list of 62 regular grocery items. In August 2024, the basket of popular items cost £133.99 from Ocado, despite its price match to Tesco, where the same items cost £123.62 (without member prices). Tesco’s price match to Aldi also falls short, with the discount retailer charging just £110.58.
In response to John Lewis’s announcement, MoneySavingExpert’s Martin Lewis (no relation) referred people to his 2011 blog, ‘Price promises aren’t usually worth the paper they’re written on’. In it he notes that price pledges offer customers reassurance that they’re getting the best deal, without actually offering anything in return. If a customer goes to the effort of checking competitors’ prices after they’ve bought an item, and then goes through the complaints process, all they receive is a matching price - the thing that was promised from the start.
But given the increasingly high value of customer trust in communications, John Lewis has decided it needs to correct (again) what it sees as an unwarranted reputation for expensiveness. While price matching may not ultimately mean exactly the same costs for consumers, it is the reassurance of value that the retailer is aiming for.
In the short term, the move is working, in terms of attention at least. Analysis of search volumes show that the volume of searches for ‘price match john lewis’ has ballooned to more than twice that of Argos, and over ten times that of the next retailer offering a price match, Asda. The immediate consumer response has also been positive.
We’ll see in the coming months what effect, if any, this marketing push has on John Lewis’s sales numbers. And, of course, we await their Christmas ads with baited breath…
Come back for next week’s Your Weekly Antidote, another dose of data-driven news analysis on one of the biggest stories of the week from your favourite comms tech agency.
