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.