Consumers have a love / hate relationship with Black Friday. Last Christmas, a staggering £2.2bn was spent on gifts that would ultimately be returned. It is making us less thoughtful as a nation.

We wanted to reverse this trend, we identified an opportunity for John Lewis to rekindle a more positive feeling around Christmas with their customers. With their range of products and network of much loved partners (staff), John Lewis can credibly help people find the perfect gift for their loved ones, no matter how small their budget or how little time they have. We wanted to take a stand against Black Friday and everything it represents and at the same time amplify one of the core things John Lewis stands for: thoughtful gifting.

We created Thoughtful Thursdays. A platform to inspire thoughtful gifting ideas. A radical new approach to tackling the problem of the increasing lack of thoughtfulness.

We released 55 thoughtful gifting ideas across each Thursday in December, in-store, online and through paid media. Each one was a free idea related to a popular John Lewis gift item that would help people make their gift just that little bit more thoughtful.

We got every partner in the business involved by inviting them to send in their thoughtful gifting ideas. We turned these ideas into stop-motion social content which created a wave of thoughtfulness across John Lewis’s social channels and Pinterest.

We created ‘Thoughtful Gifting’ stations in-store, where customers had access to gifting specialists and could ask a gift tag poet to write bespoke gift messages.

We championed thoughtful gifting across the UK, through high impact press and OOH at key stations and retail environments.

We asked people to join our ‘thoughtful gifting’ movement and tweet their thoughtful gifting ideas, which we broadcast them onto One Piccadilly Circus.

Our thoughtful gifting movement worked. On a relatively tiny media budget we put the thoughtfulness back into Christmas:

• 15 million Twitter impressions on launch day, with #ThoughtfulThursdays trending one day one

• Over 855k engagements with our social content

• Facebook reached over 2.5m unique users over the festive period (and the video creative averaged an cost efficient cost per view of just 1p)

• Pinterest averaged an engagement rate of 3.91%, +15% higher than average

• Most importantly we drove sales in-between Black Friday and Christmas

• Specifically sales were up 9.6% vs 2015 and +14% vs 2014, ensuring it was John Lewis’s most successful December period since Black Friday arrived in the UK!

“Thoughtful Thursday’s was so well received by customers at Christmas that we’re extending the concept to Valentine’s Day and other moments across the year. It’s an idea we plan to own in 2017”

Rachel Swift, Head of Brand, John Lewis