This is the story of how John Lewis’s brand extension - John Lewis Insurance - merrily danced around the pitfalls of convention, pirouetted in the face of disaster and, in doing so, achieved the impossible: selling insurance whilst building the overall parent brand.

We pulled this off by taking our communications approach well beyond the confines of traditional brand extension marketing.

In fact, instead of trading off the brand’s name, we opted 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. And right at the centre of this was a totally transformative creative idea…

This idea was based in an understanding that, despite what the rest of the category would have us believe, our audience wasn’t buying insurance because they wanted to be saved from life going disastrously wrong. Instead, we found that they were buying insurance because they wanted to be liberated – freed from having to worry about damage or accidents when they were otherwise enjoying life.

It was in this way, that we focused our efforts around the radical idea that John Lewis Insurance provided:

“Insurance for when family life is going really right”

The result was a very unusual brand extension campaign indeed.

Starring a little bespectacled ballerina, Tiny Dancer’s wobbly arabesque, stuttering glissade and homespun routine, managed to dance an insurance brand right into the nation’s hearts and become a genuine cultural phenomenon overnight.

• The campaign made headlines across every national newspaper and quickly generated over 13 million online views

• John Lewis Insurance brand awareness reached a new all-time highi

• Insurance quotes increased 59% during the campaignii

• Which led to a 61% increase in insurance salesii

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

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

But most, vitally, “Tiny Dancer’ also did the impossible. It lived up to the requirement for it to do double-duty: selling insurance and delivering a pay-back to the parent brand. In fact...

• Tiny Dancer paid back £13.8m in additional revenue to the overall department store businessiv

This final result was momentous. Tiny Dancer had far exceeded the precedents laid down by the retail brand extension campaigns that had gone before it and, in doing so, created an exciting new model for retail brand extension marketing.

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

i Source: HPI

ii Source: John Lewis Insurance

iii Source: Annalect econometrics

iv Source: Marketshare econometrics