This paper tells the story of how John Lewis went from a trusted department store retailer to one of Britain’s most loved, talked about and visited brands.

Since 2009 the central marketing objective has been to deepen the emotional connection with customers in order to increase their spend and attract new visitors to John Lewis. This objective has lived through all communications, but none more so than in the two major campaign pillars – Christmas and supporting the brand’s uniquely-worded value promise to be Never Knowingly Undersold.

All John Lewis marketing is built upon deep human truths. For the Never Knowingly Undersold campaigns, the focus has been on the emotional power of permanence in a world of ever-changing offers and discounts. For Christmas campaigns, John Lewis has presented itself as the home of more thoughtful gifting, leveraging universal insights around the effort and excitement involved in choosing the perfect gift.

The results have been spectacular – the brand response, the social and cultural impact, and the commercial returns.

TV advertising awareness increased by a factor of six driving up key metrics and delivering a powerful emotional connection with the brand. In 2010 and 2011 John Lewis was voted Brand of the Year by the UK’s Marketing Society, an unprecedented back-to-back accolade.

The social impact was even more marked. Views on YouTube have exceeded 10 million, whilst John Lewis become the 2nd most talked about brand in the UK (beating Apple and Amazon), with the campaign regularly trending globally on Twitter.

However, few campaigns have had a cultural effect like John Lewis has. The music featured has regularly topped the charts, with sales and radio airplay giving the brand free exposure worth over £20m. The creative has also been extensively discussed in the national media, delivering over £4m of additional free media exposure.

More incredibly, schools and churches have made the campaign an official subject for discussion, and it is now the basis for school media studies exams.

Altogether this helped John Lewis to recruit more customers, and got existing customers spending more, leading to record sales and the highest market share for years.

In all, the campaign generated over £400m in extra profit. That’s £5 profit for every £1 spent. This is remarkable when so many UK retailers are struggling. No paper better shows the power of creative marketing to make million of people cry, and then buy.