All the Modern Cons

Companies are really sold on a current trend in advertising: their shop as your life, or as something to be with you for the whole of your life - barring recessions rendering either you or the shop bankrupt. Lloyds are with us For the Journey, Nationwide offer us our lives on a merry-go-round, and British Gas have immortalized the total separation and isolation in which we live from others – anyone beyond our networked friends and family, that is – by portraying our homes as self-contained planets. Similarly, Sky’s broadband advert has us (and the whole family) living every moment of our lives through our broadband and TV package. Last year John Lewis produced an advert which showed a woman’s life, from cot to retirement, through her J.L. purchases - all set to Fyfe Dangerfield’s cover of She’s Always a Woman.

Radio on the TV

A more recent advert for John Lewis showed several decades, walks of life and musical genres through home entertainment purchases. Featured were: a 1980s teenager listening to the Smiths’s This Charming Man on a hi-fi while making a tape for his girlfriend; several 1970s students listening to Elton John’s Rocket Man on a turntable, with a teacher asking them to turn it down; the staff and clientele of a 1960s café listening to Dusty Springfield’s I only Want to be with You on a radio; a 1980s woman listening to Sade’s Smooth Operator on a Walkman in her pool - which is safer than using the same device in a river and swimming into the path of a boat, like Jeff Buckley. Lastly the ad closed with two present day youngsters making out (almost) in front of the Kooks’s Shine On. Perhaps challenging the ‘music is paramount’ theme of the retro scenes, the Kooks track was playing on the TV – too good to just hear, yet not good enough to actually watch.

Some of these scenes seemed to be (deliberately) unusual choices for representations of John Lewis customers – elsewhere viewed as predominantly middle aged and middle class. Despite that, and accepting for now that school children, Morrissey-loving teens and Black Beauty-watching Asian families were shopping in John Lewis for their electrical goods 30 years ago, wasn’t the advert being a tad optimistic in suggesting that John Lewis enjoyed the custom of black youngsters from the terraced streets of early 1980s England - the England of the Brixton Riots and New Cross Fire? In the advert a boy took the mick as his white friend danced to the Selecter’s On My Radio - played on a John Lewis-bought radio/tape machine. The suggestion of spending power is a more cheerful portrayal than This is England I grant you, but still.

As for ‘We’ve always been Never Knowingly Undersold’ - words plastered over the Kooks - just take a moment to read that sentence and look at the words used in it. My god, that’s some unfortunate gibberish. Admittedly ‘we’ve always been never’ would make a great cutesy love song for a female vocal group. Possibly “We’ve always been: Never Knowingly Undersold” might make more sense, highlighting that the last part is a quote to be taken as one thing – a state of never-knowingly-undersold-ness. Punctuation’s got to be clearer than selective capitals, guys.

To get it in full, as delivered in previous adverts and on a dedicated page: ‘Never Knowingly Undersold on quality, price and service.’ What is John Lewis trying to say? To undersell on price would be to offer something cheaper than your competitors, so they’ve announced that they have never knowingly been cheaper than other shops. As for quality and service… yes, that does sound good, but all they are really saying is that service/quality have never knowingly been undervalued - they’ve never knowingly compromised on them. It’s a long-winded and self-important way of saying that they try to value those things as a company, as far as they know. Indeed, the ‘never knowingly’ proviso isn’t really filling us with confidence; it sounds a bit like James Murdoch. Maybe they imagine people at home just try to watch the Kooks.

Mind you, they aren’t the only ones bending words out of shape. Since David Cameron started talking about coasting schools (although the term actually has a longer, cross party history) the phrase has become a media favourite for describing stragglers and the negatively average. Supposedly coasting is bad - pootling along with minimal effort when you could be aiming higher and achieving better. Now this useful little word is being used to demonize schools and is often repeated by the media. However, opening my dictionary, coasting means to ‘be successful without making much effort.’ It has nothing to do with underperformance, only ease of performance. To attain without much effort is how some people define genius.

Ah, what does it matter. John Lewis: Electrical Goods for the Surprisingly Affluent Masses has been replaced with a Christmas ad anyway. Now we see a surprisingly affluent little boy who’s bought his parents a large looking present. Go figure. Or go trend on Twitter.