Idea generating: John Lewis pitch

The other week we got set a brief to work with our trend story from our contexts brief and generate ideas for how our given store would use the trend story and will be given an end outcome. We will have to consider the store and its target consumer. When I got set this I was very excited because when I studied art we often got given commissions, I enjoy the thought of creating an idea suited to a target person and a criteria.

our store was John Lewis, our trend story was purity and our outcome was lens. Initially when we got given this task we automatically started to generate ideas for a end outcome and product about creating a Christmas advert about a child. we moved way to fast I know. I think that's something you can't help but do, when your suddenly given these tasks your brain goes in panic mode and wants to reach the end. I think I need to learn to not always do this as I won't fully connect myself to the task in hand. So I said to my group hey lets just take a few steps back and start to mind map somemsmaller ideas and then we can branch out from this. This actually helped a lot as it made us think of whole new ideas and what we actually want to present to the consumer and what demographic we wanted to reach.

After a lot of us going away and exploring what we wanted, I went into John Lewis itself to see what research I could gather from the store. I was pleasantly like shocked by what I found. Who knew John Lewis was actually so fun?! when I usually think of John Lewis I have an image of old people around the middle class shopping in a big department store, no offence. But the John lewis was far from that. There was so much going on, from game stations to mince pie tasting. I never knew John Lewis was suddenly all about customer experience but i'm here for it. What I took away from this is that teenagers have a stereotype about John Lewis which isn't always positive. They need to reach a younger audience because I'm sure they would love shopping in John Lewis!

Following my trip to the store I went back and started to generate more ideas. me and my group decided that we wanted to focus on creating idea that was aimed at a younger demographic this would help there social presence and would help to break the stigma and stereotype that surround the store with the younger generation. We continued to expand on this and came up with the big idea of a "home away from home". This was inspired about what would draw students to the store and how John Lewis more than likely has everything a desperate student would want. we proposed the idea of having a future in the store such as a sale associate to help give advice to a student about things you would need when your away from home. The way lens element would fall into it is that we could promote this idea through their social accounts and would create a promotional film and in store imagery and would connect local colleges to advertise the store as an affordable and welcoming community to help settle and advise students.

I really enjoyed this brief as it allowed me to generate ideas within a time frame to fit to a consumer and acquire group skills.