Blog: Why retail's next reputation challenge won't be solved by a brand campaign  

The John Lewis Christmas ad is a cultural institution. Every November, the ad is hotly anticipated, and it creates genuine talkability and buzz. The competition between John Lewis and other major retailers to capture the hearts, minds (and wallets) of festive shoppers is fierce; and they’re not afraid to throw money at it. 

UK advertising spend is expected to exceed £12bn in the Christmas quarter this year. That investment reflects decades of accumulated wisdom about how to influence consumer behaviour, and it works. Sainsbury’s’ CEO has attributed six consecutive Christmas market share gains directly to marketing cut through. 

But the nature of what consumers expect from retail communications has changed. Yes, we all get excited about the John Lewis Christmas ad, but we will also actively scrutinise the way they treat their staff, price their products, manage their supply chains and comply with regulation. Consumers aren’t the only audience asking harder questions of retailers either. Regulators, parliamentary committees, investors and the media covering retail as a matter of public interest are all applying pressure that brand campaigns were never designed to address. 

Since around 2022, regulatory and investor attention on retailers has intensified.  Institutional scrutiny has always existed, but it has grown in scale, and retailers can’t afford to treat it as a secondary concern.  

Regulation has come into force from multiple directions simultaneously; greenwashing enforcement moving from guidance to criminal sanction, pricing practices becoming the subject of parliamentary legislation, supply chain accountability elevated from compliance function to matter of public interest when a 2025 parliamentary inquiry confirmed that goods linked to forced labour were still entering UK retail supply chains. Each of these pressures would have been manageable in isolation, but they’re happening all at once. Corporate reputation has never been in sharper focus.  

The debate over electronic shelf labels (ESL) illustrates how quickly this can unravel. Initially framed as a move to save staff time, reduce waste and drive efficiency, their roll out seemed relatively innocuous from a consumer perspective. But then in April of this year, the Bank of England’s deputy governor commented that ESL rollout would allow retailers to ‘respond to market conditions in real time’, framing the technology as a direct enabler of dynamic pricing. The political reaction was almost immediate. Parliament intervened within days, and the Secretary of State for Business and Trade took to social media to demand that supermarkets rule out surge pricing. As recently as June 2026, a former supermarket pricing director was still making the public case that the problem was not dynamic pricing itself but whether customers understood what was happening and believed they were being treated fairly. 

That last observation neatly summarises the problem. The technology was legitimate and the operational rationale was sound. But the communications had not been built for every audience, and by the time those audiences were engaged, trust was already depleted. 

The pressure does not stop at the retailer’s door but extends to businesses across the entire retail ecosystem. For example, the FCA has introduced new safeguarding rules, raising the compliance bar for payments providers. Government consultations on the safety of AI enabled products are impacting an array of tech suppliers to retail, and supply chain businesses (in many cases smaller, more agile players) face the same scrutiny under the Modern Slavery Act as the retail behemoths they supply. There is an almost unprecedented sector wide obligation for businesses that supply, power or enable retail, to tow the regulatory line whilst managing reputational risk and protecting their corporate profile.  

That’s why it’s critical that corporate narratives are not treated as something to be built reactively under scrutiny but continuously refined and stress tested – with an enduring focus on authenticity and credibility. It can be surprisingly difficult to do this from within an organisation. How a business sees itself inevitably shapes its external comms, but an ever more complex stakeholder universe makes it really hard to consider corporate comms objectively. And working with a partner gives retail businesses and suppliers’ comms teams the scalability they need when navigating ever more complex issues. 

None of this is solved by better marketing or a more heart-rending Christmas ad. The John Lewis ad will still land every November, and it should – a good campaign and a resilient reputation are not competing projects. But they are different projects, and the ESL episode showed how quickly the gap between them becomes visible. 

The businesses that come through moments like this with credibility intact will not be the ones with the best crisis response. They will be the ones whose narrative was built, tested and already trusted, giving them a far more solid foundation to respond from.