Can JD Williams’s ‘slavish focus’ on midlife women alleviate awareness woes?

JD Williams has been around since 1875. Its heritage means prompted awareness has typically been high, but getting the brand to be top of mind when people are ready to shop has been a major challenge.

Head of brand at N Brown, Esme Stone, tells The Drum that the marketing team has been “wrestling” with its awareness problem. Stone acknowledges it’s difficult to keep a heritage brand feeling fresh and relevant; the crux, though, she says, is down to an inconsistent creative strategy.

“We have failed to stick in the consumer’s mind for any one thing because we previously flip-flopped with different creative executions,” she says. “There wasn’t a unified belief in what the brand stood for.”

In 2017, JD Williams ran its ‘The Lifestore’ campaign with previous brand ambassador Loraine Kelly, which saw Kelly and others adorned in florals jumping in front of a flower wall background. Stone admits Kelly felt too “expected” from the brand. “She’s lovely and I can see why women love her, but she was never really ever going to be someone I would look to for fashion inspiration,” she adds.

Its first move towards more inclusive advertising, the 2018 ’I’m Just Getting Started’ campaign, was a clear break from ’Lifestore’ but its 2019 ’Compliments’ campaign again failed to resonate with its demographic.

In 2019, the marketing team decided to pause and take stock of what it wanted JD Williams to be. At the same time, the wider N Brown business decided to segment the portfolio so it covered all female adult demographics. The idea was that the group could seamlessly transition women from its Simply Be brand (aimed at the 25-45 group) into JD Williams (45-65) and then Ambrose Wilson (65+).

“We are going to be slavishly focused on the needs of the 45- to 65-year-old woman. We’re not going to design our shop for anyone else. It’s a really powerful USP.”

Stone points to Marks & Spencer and Next as having previously been associated with midlife, but said their approaches “almost shackled those brands to a perception of fuddyduddyness.”

“It almost negated their appeal to a lot of women, who thought, ’I don’t want to shop there because I associate it with corduroy trousers and sensible jumpers.’” Luckily for JD Williams, those brands have become “generalists” in deciding to pursue younger audiences, she says. “That’s been manna from heaven for us. While other brands concern themselves with courting a younger woman, we’re going to stick steadfast to our belief in being a specialist for midlife.” (Although crucially, adds Stone, without the “fuddyduddy” and instead “rewriting the narrative completely around midlife.”)

The brand brought on House 337 to help it find consistency and cater to this demographic (the creative agency’s executive creative director, Zara Ineson, previously revealed the agency’s strategy work in The Drum). The partnership led to a new brand platform, ’Admit It, This Age Thing Suits You,’ with its spring/summer and autumn/winter campaigns busting midlife myths and rejecting cliches.

“There’s a lot to look forward to at this stage in life, it’s just that no one is out there actually talking to these women and saying, ‘know what, we see you and, actually, we are going to celebrate you’ and ‘isn’t this a great to be a midlife woman?’”

Where to find JD Williams’s audience

With a fresh creative strategy, JD Williams also needed a media shake-up. “Unfortunately,” jokes Stone, its audience is consumers of expensive media. As 45- to 60-year-old C2DE females, JD Williams shoppers watch a lot of linear TV and are big into the soaps, shiny-floor shows and reality programs such as Big Brother and I’m a Celebrity…Get me Out of Here.

“We have to be in the places our audience is on mass and, unfortunately for us, that is linear TV – although it is great for us creatively.”

JD Williams has taken sponsorship of ITV’s My Mum, Your Dad, a dating show for single parents hosted by JD Williams’s ambassador Davina McCall. The brand has also bought a package for ITV’s Big Brother reboot.

Along with broadcast TV, radio is a core channel for JD Williams. Stone says she has experimented with podcasts but as these are primarily listened to by AB1 audiences, they are no longer part of her plan.

For the spring/summer campaign, JD Williams went heavy on out-of-home. “When you are trying to start a new narrative around midlife and to provoke debate and thought, out-of-home is really useful. It allows you to be brazen and shocking with your approach.” However, in its autumn/winter campaign, TV is the priority as more people stay home due to the living cost crisis.

JD Williams’s next challenge to solve

The strategic repositioning has boosted JD Williams’s ‘fame’ score according to YouGov polling, up 8% from 61% in Q3 2020 to 69% in 2023. Its autumn/winter campaign also received an ’exceptional’ rating from System1’s effectiveness scoring for long-term brand growth, scoring 5.2 compared with the category average of 2.5.

Despite promising early results, Stone and House 337 aren’t resting on their laurels. The next step is to create an always-on strategy that can help boost JD Williams’s spontaneous awareness. “The problem we have with JD Williams is keeping that spontaneity growing and making it prolific,” Stone admits.

Currently, spontaneous awareness when JD Williams is not running a campaign is around 1% in terms of the top five retailers women can recall unprompted. This peaked at 4% when the My Mum, Your Dad sponsorship was on the air. “We need to find ways to create always-on content that can cut through beyond the campaigns. We are trying to work that out.”

While admitting there is still lots to be done, Stone concludes: “We’ve got a really committed creative strategy now and we have a really clear articulation of the women we want to speak to.”