On the face of it, John Lewis Insurance, was a typical retail brand extension like so many that had gone before it.

But there was a critical difference.

Unlike other retail brand extensions, its communications couldn’t just focus on selling hard within the conventions of its new category.

This approach would have risked damaging the John Lewis brand and, vitally, also failed to meet the communications’ unique commercial requirements…

John Lewis still only had capacity for 2 big campaigns a year: Christmas and just one other. This meant that to justify the expense to the partnership…

This brand extension campaign had to do double-duty:

sell insurance and deliver a pay-back to its parent brand.

This was a seemingly insurmountable challenge.

Brand extension marketing usually only worked to draw from the value of the brand, not give back to it.

Faced with this, we determined to develop our own transformative approach to brand extension marketing.

Instead of trading off the brand’s name,

We would learn how to transplant the brand’s heart.

This meant developing an insurance campaign that also felt like it came authentically from the very core of the John Lewis brand, replete with the brand’s trademark:

Insight

Emotion

And Fame

The result was a very unusual retail brand extension campaign indeed.

“Tiny Dancer” became a genuine cultural phenomenon.

The campaign’s insight, emotion and fame made headlines across national newspapers for weeks after launch and resulted in:

• John Lewis Insurance brand awareness reaching a new all-time high

• Insurance quotes increasing 59% during the campaign

• Which led to a 61% increase in insurance sales

• With advertising being responsible for almost ¼ of all new insurance business

• And the greatest volume coming from Premier policies, up 103%

But most, vitally, “Tiny Dancer’ also did the once seemingly impossible:

• It paid back £13.8m in additional revenue to its parent brand.

All of this meant that “Tiny Dancer” had not just been successful on the terms of the other retail brand extensions that had gone before it, but had far exceeded their precedents

As well as effectively selling its product in its new category, it had also delivered an unprecedented commercial return for its department store parent brand and, in doing so, created an exciting new model for retail brand extension marketing.

This is the story of “Tiny Dancer”: the retail brand extension campaign that stole the nation’s hearts and actually gave something back.

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