M&S’s core customer is a strong, stylish family woman who embraces the challenge that Christmas brings around. For her, the festive season is an opportunity to indulge in her love of gifting and making those close to her feel loved.

Unfortunately, 21st century Christmas retail marketing was failing to represent or engage her in an aspirational and relevant way. Advertising largely represented her as the embattled wife slaving away preparing Christmas dinner and messaging had become less about thoughtfulness and more about value.

With almost half of British women feeling that there is a lack of strong female role models, we saw an opportunity for M&S to reconnect with it’s lost audience through a new, relatable, modern female icon.

So we created a modern day Mrs Claus - a Christmas icon fit for the 21st Century woman, who would champion and represent the values and personality of M&S customers.

To make Mrs Claus instantly famous we partnered with Channel 4 to give her the prestigious role of ‘Officially opening Christmas’ on the channel, via a specially created, co-branded 3-minute ad-break takeover in hit show Gogglebox.

A fully optimised online video and paid social campaign maximised online views of the ad break.

At the same time, Mrs Claus took over M&S’s Twitter handle with her own custom emoji, conversing directly with the thousands of people talking about her.

In her first 3 hours live she responded to over 250 individuals with unique pieces of content each time, making #LoveMrsClaus trend instantly.

A social listening and responsive paid media plan ensured we could respond to different audience signals with relevant Mrs Claus content.

On M&S.com select products were given exclusive 'Mrs Claus recommends' status and staff were empowered to offer Mrs Claus spot rewards to the most loyal customers.

The campaign impact was significant, both culturally and commercially.

In the evening we introduced Mrs Claus to the nation, the buzz around her was instantaneous. There were an average 158 tweets per minute featuring the #LoveMrsClaus hashtag.

Overall social share of voice went up 250% YOY.

The Mrs Claus film received over 80M views online (65M unpaid) and the original soundtrack reached #1 on the iTunes Classical chart on launch weekend.

PR coverage was significant, both in the UK and globally. The UK Telegraph declared that ‘In a bid to help 2016 come to a less crashing end for women, M&S have saved the day with their Christmas offering’.

Footfall increased by 1.5% YOY and traffic to the M&S website increased by 14%.

M&S increased it's quarterly sales for the first time in 6 years and deliver it's best overall Christmas since 2013 with a 5.9% increase in sales YOY.