The Bear and the Hare: the 2013 Christmas campaign

Read the campaign story

John Lewis’s 2013 Christmas story gave a gift a specific job. A hare realises that his bear friend will miss Christmas because he hibernates. An alarm clock lets the bear wake and join the celebration. Contemporary reporting described the film as an argument for understanding the recipient, rather than simply buying an impressive object. The product matters because it removes the obstacle between a friend and an experience.

The execution combined hand-drawn animation with physical model sets. adam&eveDDB developed the campaign, with Elliot Dear and Yves Geleyn directing through Blinkink. Alongside the television film, the characters appeared in books, merchandise, store displays, social activity and other supporting media. The campaign therefore supplied a small fictional world that could be encountered in different forms, not only a commercial repeated on different screens.

Editorial reading: The emotional resolution comes from diagnosis before purchase. The hare notices a problem that the bear cannot solve alone and chooses a useful intervention. That makes the giver’s attention, rather than the object’s price, the source of value. For a retailer carrying many categories, this is a flexible promise: the right item is the one that fits the person’s situation.

The animation also creates a form of distance. An impossible woodland friendship can express care without asking the audience to believe that a recorded human incident happened spontaneously. This is a clearly fictional fable. Its production craft supports that frame, while recurring characters make the same idea legible in a shop window, a book or a toy. Those extensions work best when they preserve the story’s meaning rather than merely reproduce its surface.

A smaller retailer could use the same logic by showing a modest object solving a recognisable obstacle for a particular recipient. The test is whether viewers can explain why this gift was chosen. If any product could replace it without changing the story, the emotional work and the merchandising work have drifted apart. A thoughtful gift guide might apply the principle more directly than an expensive film.

This case is limited to the 2013 campaign. It does not import sales figures discussed alongside earlier John Lewis Christmas advertisements in launch coverage. The opened sources establish the narrative, craft and cross-channel execution, not an isolated sales effect. The transferable lesson is to make generosity observable through the accuracy of the choice, then carry that idea consistently into the buying experience.

Start with the recipient’s problem

Choose the gift only after defining what the recipient is missing or struggling to experience.

Keep the product necessary

Check that replacing the item would change the story’s resolution.

Extend meaning across channels

Use characters and assets in retail only when they preserve the original gifting idea.

A small test for another brief

Show one inexpensive product removing a specific obstacle for a recipient.

Measure explanation of gift choice and guide-to-product clicks.

Stop if the story depends on misleading product capabilities or viewers cannot explain why this item fits.

• Identify a real recipient need with consent.
• Build a short fictional or clearly documented gift story.
• Carry the same need into a simple buying guide.