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 the 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 offering and campaign that 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 brand extension campaign indeed.

Stretching from 2013-2015, and climaxing with the Cannes Gold-winning “Tiny Dancer”, this strategy resulted in:

• A mutually profitable partnership with RSA (formerly Royal and Sun Alliance) that significantly reduced John Lewis's advertising cost

• An insurance campaign that became a genuine cultural phenomenon

• Doubling John Lewis Insurance’s sales on launch and then, again, by a further 61% with “Tiny Dancer”

• The greatest volume of this second increase coming from the hero Premier policies, up 103%

• This translated to ROIs of £1.45/£1.00 and £1.17/£1.00, for each respective phase

But, most vitally, this campaign also did the once seemingly impossible:

• It paid-back a total of £16.7m in additional revenue to the overall John Lewis department store business (with the biggest contribution coming from “Tiny Dancer”), at effectively zero cost

This final result was momentous. It meant that this campaign had not just been successful on the terms of the other retail brand extension campaigns 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 parent brand and, in doing so, created an exciting new model for retail brand extension marketing.

This is the story of John Lewis Insurance, the retail brand extension with the campaign that stole the nation’s hearts and actually gave something back.

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