John Lewis & Partners signs Qubist for partner advocacy program

This article is brought to you by Retail Technology Review: John Lewis & Partners signs Qubist for partner advocacy program.

Following a successful pilot, Qubist, the Employee Advocacy app, has announced that John Lewis & Partners has rolled out its proprietary award-winning advocacy technologyacross its 51 stores nationwide.

Qubist’s app will close the gap between the online and in store experience for customers through a social marketing program to engage some of its 26,000Partners (employees). The new app empowers Partners to share content, increasing brand engagement and awareness to drive sales and growth in 2018. 

The retail brand offered Partners the opportunity to exclusively launch its 2018 Christmas advertising campaign “The Boy and the Piano”, featuring Elton John, across social media two hours before being shared by the retailer itself. Partners used the hashtag #WeArePartnersto share the ad which resulted in it trending on Twitter within an hour of launch.

Eva Bojtos, Senior Manager - Social Marketing Team at John Lewis & Partners, says, “The passion and knowledge of our Partners is very powerful and inspiring. Giving them a way in which to connect personally with customers online provides a deeper more meaningful relationship. 

She continued, “The ‘#WeArePartners programme’ is already delivering some great results. We have seen a direct correlation between the activity on the Qubist app and appointments in-store such as with our Personal Stylists.’

Qubist CEO Andrew Seel says: “The Qubist app allows John Lewis & Partners to scale and measure Partner advocacy - inspiring partner sharing with content suggestions and prompts about products, services and events and achieving sustainable sharing through gamification and smart content targeting.

He continued, “For a big brand such as John Lewis & Partners, the opportunity through Qubist is huge - empowering Partners to transform the passion they have to create a highly effective social media strategy to drive the business.”

Qubist’s app enables companies such as John Lewis & Partners to enhance their marketing activities and performance through employee-driven social marketing with a personal, human touch. According to MSL Group, brand messages shared by employees on social media earn 561% more reach than the same messages shared by the brand’s social media channels — and eight times more engagement.

The initial pilot of the Qubist app was across eight stores and Head Office. Partners enjoyed the ease of use of the mobile app, its gamification features and seeing which shop was top of the leaderboard each week, driving engagement. 

Qubist provided flexible UK-based strategic support to John Lewis & Partners including onboarding early adopters effectively to the program to transform partners into digital ambassadors. Partners responded well to the personal and human feel to the app and John Lewis & Partners saw extremely good results in terms of reach and engagement.