To give LEGO more meaning across the Christmas period, we looked to find a way to attach the brand to one of the many rituals of the season by helping families make it even more special through our unique play experience. That ritual? Building the family tree.

Christmas trees are the ultimate symbol of families coming together over a fun, creative and inclusive experience. Every tree tells a unique story and much like different combinations of LEGO bricks capture and unlock a world of memories, dreams and tales, as do the decorations on a family’s tree.

Yet the most important decoration, the one which completes the tree, is often the least meaningful. Despite taking top spot, the family star is typically a mass produced decoration with no emotional significance or story behind it.

This led to our insight: Families come together to build their tree, but not their star…

INSPIRE

We started the campaign by enlisting our 5,000+ LEGO Club members to build a bank of stars to feature in our campaign and inspire the masses. They jumped at the opportunity, sharing over 3,500 stars!

At the same time we were busy building our massive star to sit atop our 32ft LEGO tree in the center of Melbourne. Time lapse content of this build accumulated over 1.8million views.

BUILD

We made things easier by partnering with the nation’s biggest newspapers to include full-page instructions in their weekend mastheads, and by holding ‘brick-in-hand’ experiences across Australia, where families received free LEGO and help building their own stars on-site.

CELEBRATE

Lastly, to reward families for getting involved and to excite more to share we gave national fame to the most imaginative stars by featuring them across social media and heroeing 5 lucky builds in customized versions of our TV commercial.

This idea immediately resonated with Australian families, with thousands building and sharing their LEGO stars across the four week campaign – helping to build our reach far beyond what the budget allowed.

This helped Christmas 2015 become LEGO Australia’s new star campaign; one that, despite having less budget than 2014 and no movie wave to ride, delivered their best-ever quarterly sales results (up 18.8% on 2014, 4.8% above target), a 287% increase in social engagement year-on-year (237% above target), and resulted in them retaining their #1 toy brand position for the second consecutive year.

By inspiring families to come together and build their star, we not only transformed the most valuable Christmas real estate into a new media channel, but we also helped shift LEGO from being just another product they opened on Christmas Day to a brand that’ll be a meaningful part of their Christmas for years to come.

Make LEGO the Star of Christmas is a campaign that, through a powerful insight and creative use of media, helped LEGO transform the most valuable Christmas real-estate (the star at the top of the family tree) into a new hyper-personalized media channel – one that acts as a constant reminder to families across the season that LEGO is the ultimate toy.

Thousands of families created and shared their LEGO star, which not only grew our reach far beyond what the budget allowed, but resulted in LEGO Australia’s most successful campaign ever.

Our opportunity was clear: inspire families to give their star the meaning it deserves by coming together and building it out of LEGO!

In doing so, we not only helped give LEGO more meaning at Christmas, but transformed the most valuable Christmas real-estate (the top of the tree) into a new, hyper-personalized media channel; one that acts as a constant reminder to families across the whole season of how LEGO is the ultimate toy.

To bring this to life we created a new campaign: Make LEGO the Star of Christmas.

Every touchpoint, every message, every brand experience was all geared towards inspiring and helping families to give LEGO pride-of-place ontop of their tree; existing across three key pillars:

Inspire – rally families across Australia to build their star.

Build – provide instructions and guidance to help build their star.

Celebrate – showcase families’ stars to inspire others to build theirs.

LEGO and Christmas go hand-in-hand. Both are icons of bringing families together over childlike creativity, imagination and nostalgia. Yet despite this, LEGO was only seen as a gift option for Christmas Day rather than a meaningful part of the season for Australian families.

To build on 2014, which following the amazing success of ‘The LEGO Movie’ was the brand’s best-ever year, LEGO knew retail-driven toy marketing was not going to be enough. They needed to be the star of Christmas, standing out amongst all other toy brands by more emotionally connecting to Australian families across the season, measuring success by:

- Increasing Q4 sales by +14% YoY.

- Retaining #1 position.

- Increasing social engagement by +50% YoY.

However, with no movie to ride, a reduced marketing budget and increased competition it looked like they would need a Christmas miracle…