Ian Jindal

Leadership and transformation in multichannel retail and eCommerce

Brief appearance on the BBC’s ‘Christmas at John Lewis’ documentary

Provided you didn’t blink in the wrong place you may have caught my contribution to a BBC documentary on how John Lewis prepares for Christmas. I had great fun contributing to a topic that we’ve covered ourselves – namely how the elite retailers prepare for peak. An interesting take within the programme was that #BlackFriday had changed the ‘traditional’ Christmas peak, and further looked at the role of eCommerce ‘pure play’ giant Amazon.co.uk in the competitive landscape for John Lewis.

The programme aired on 23 December, 2015, titled “Christmas Shopping Fever 2015: John Lewis and the Retail Race” and you can see it for a while on BBC iPlayer – http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b06t3kqt/christmas-shopping-fever-2015-john-lewis-and-the-retail-race

 

Ian Jindal discussing John Lewis with Cherry Healey for BBC 2's

 

I was really impressed with the research the team did beforehand. We had a number of phone discussions, follow-up questions and a good brief on the ‘arc’ of the show. I had a great time filming my snippets and even though it was a couple of hours the time passed really quickly. I’m sure that TV production crews forget how interesting we find the whole process! Most of the filming I do is around our events and these tend to be one-take-only commentaries. At first I thought that it was a luxury to have more time, but now I simply feel a combination of awe and sympathy at the skill and patience needed to turn hundreds of hours of footage into a coherent, brief broadcast!

My on-screen contribution comprised of a review of the customer expectations on delivery (c 0h24’) and upon the role of SEO in supporting visibility and sales at peak (c0h30’).

We’ve covered John Lewis extensively on InternetRetailing – they’re one of our “Elite” UK retailers in the InternetRetailing Top500. You can see John Lewis’ company listing as well as information on the Top500 on our site.

We also covered BlackFriday and CyberMonday with rolling, on-the-hour information on the performance of the Top23 retailers in the UK and John Lewis’ performance over peak fared well.

Ian Jindal on the BBC's documentary on John Lewis' Christmas, 2015


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