Background

The Society invited Cool Blue to develop campaigns for its home contents insurance products. The financial services market was undergoing extreme pressure due to the recession so the climate for selling this kind of product was already severely challenged. There was a further issue to overcome in the campaign due to the fact that the Society’s home contents insurance products are relatively high cost compared to many other insurance products available.

In marketing terms, domestic insurance is seen as the most competitive and commoditised of financial products. It’s difficult to illustrate the advantages of one policy over another and challenging to convince customers who are often just looking for the ‘cheapest fix’ why they should choose a more expensive option.

Strategy

Cool Blue developed three concepts which were focused on demonstrating the quality of the Society’s products and services against those of its competitors.

The Society has a strong presence on the high street and one of its differentiators and strengths is its highly personalised and caring customer service.

Each of the campaigns produced were focused on these attributes emphasising the fact that the Society makes sure that its customers have excellent quality coverage with no hidden nasties, that its staff will take the time to meet up and talk through the policies face to face and that it will be a true partner in times of trouble when policies need to be invoked.

We also developed an innovative affiliate campaign with Rington’s Tea another well known, highly visible northern brand with an excellent reputation for personalised high quality customer service.

Result

We called the ensuing campaign ‘for when there’s more than a storm in your teacup’ which resulted in a 300% upswing in sales of the related insurance product and which won the Society a gold Northern Marketing Award for best financial services campaign.