3. The Problem: Low involvement
Insurance is boring
People are busy
=
Most people do nothing
4. The Problem: Low involvement
Comprehensive Car Insurance Market Population:
13,440,000 cars
Total number of cars in Australia with
comprehensive car insurance
22.5%
Reconsider
Insurance
Estimated annual in market population:
3,024,000
115,989
0.6% of cars
Each month, with 57 insurers competing for their business
Source: Car numbers - ABS Data as at Jan 2018
Only 22.5% of consumers shop the category
14 day
buying
window
5. So with so few potential
customers in market at any given
time, how can you meaningfully
grow share?
7. Solution 1: Invest in your Brand
Source: The Long and the Short of It, IPA, Les Binet and Peter Field
Brand Building and Sales Activation Time Scales
35. Comprehensive Car Insurance Market Population:
13,440,000 cars
Total number of cars in Australia with
comprehensive car insurance
22.5%
Reconsider
Insurance
Estimated annual in market population:
3,024,000
115,989
0.6% of cars
Each month, with 57 insurers competing for their business
Source: Car numbers - ABS Data as at Jan 2018
Only 22.5% of consumers shop the category
14 day
buying
window
Advertise to build
brand and
mental
availability
Advertise to
deliver direct
response
100% available
audience
22.5% available
audience
Category Best
Practice
80% brand
budget
allocation
Category Best
Practice
20% activation
budget
allocation
Little opportunity
to efficiently pull
people into market
36. 3 Solutions to Low Involvement
Invest in your brand, focus on long term
growth
Compete with culture for people’s time
Balance budgets in line with opportunity
1.
2.
3.
Be a high involvement marketer
The topic has relevance for some of those categories than others
Principles I will discuss are relevant to all.
Categories like insurance often get labelled as low involvement, so how can brands overcome this?
How can they harness the power of marketing to engage their audiences and convert apathy into interest?
I will use insurance as the example I talk to, but the principles can be applied universally.
So the problem as I have stated is apathy, or low involvement
No one wakes up in the morning and thinks excitedly, “I’m going to get some insurance today”
The reality is that people are busy, insurance is quite often a grudge purchase that people feel they need rather than something they want
Once they have an insurance policy, it’s far easier just to let that roll over and renew it each year, than it is to sit down and evaluate the options.
So what happens – most people do nothing
So here are some facts that put that into perspective
We know that only 22.5% of consumers shop the category
Looking at that another way almost 78% of people do nothing when their insurance falls due
If we apply that to the car insurance category
We start with 13.4m comprehensively insured cars in Australia
22.5% of them will consider another insurer when their insurance falls due, that’s 3m annually
If we apply a 14 day buying window and spread that across the year that is 116,000 in market any given month
So you can see how quickly what appears to be a large audience, becomes really quite small
And for that 116,000 potential policies, there are around 60 insurers competing for that business
They aren’t great odds for scale
Canstar lists 57 car insurance providers in Australia
So with so few potential customers in market at any given time, how can you meaningfully grow share?
Or even better, how can you gain an unfair share?
The first solution I’d like to propose is your brand
Your brand is your biggest asset
Particularly in a largely commoditised markets with little differentiation
Brand is the opportunity to set you apart
Yet many marketers fail to do this
And I understand why
Marketing teams are under increasing pressure to deliver sales, hit targets, drive performance
But if we do this alone, we are missing our biggest opportunity
A bit like exercising without considering your diet
This chart is from Les Binet and Peter Field’s Long and the Short of it, which explores the balance between long and short term strategies.
Short term sales activations will deliver you a return, but it’s a bit like a drug addiction, you need to keep doing it to get the high and there is no cumulative effect, the impact of your investment is finite.
It only targets the “in market” population, i.e. the 22.5%
And is usually price based or rational in it’s messaging approach
Assess results on a short term basis
Where as investing in brand has a cumulative, long term effect.
Targets the entire market: so instead of talking to 22% of the market, you are talking to 100% of your audience.
It establishes mental availability to build brands that people know and trust, and are then more likely to be the go-to for an insurance need
Unlike short term sales activations, it typically works through emotional priming more than rational persuasion
Assess on a long term basis:
Brand effects are harder to measure, because they are smaller in the short term, and there is usually no direct link to sales. But brand effects decay more slowly, and so repeated exposures can cause the base level of sales to rise. In the long run, brand effects are the main driver of growth
So who are some brands that are doing it well?
I’ll show you two examples, outside the category who excel at this approach.
Not a rational message or price point in sight
What I love about this ad is that it
Speaks to individualism, in an insightful way
It engages the audience at emotional level, leaves you feeling that is a brand you can identify with
Taps into culture and generates conversation
In a way an ad for a pair of runners at $299 could never do
In less than a year this one ad has had 30m views – and that’s not a crazy dream
No penguin price point to be seen
This ad emotionally highlights what is important at Christmas
John Lewis have been using this strategy at Christmas for many years
And with great success…
And you can’t argue with that!
Compete with culture for peoples time
This is what both John Lewis and Nike do extremely well
Focusing too heavily on competitor analysis and category norms will result in you competing with other marketing for peoples time
But this is not how your audience chooses what to engage with
Let me give you an example
Was there anyone in the room who chose option A
I really hope not
As humans we engage with what interests us, we want to be entertained, not marketed to
And this is an insight we should apply to all our marketing
We are bombarded with thousands of messages every single day
The reality is there has never before been more content
And we have never before had less time
This is what we are competing with as marketers and advertisers
So don’t create more noise with content that’s easy to ignore
Create content people want to engage with
This is a quote form Howard Gossage, a famous ad guy from the Mad Men era
Innovator for his time
And he articulates it brilliantly
This is our challenge, to create advertising that people want to read or engage with
That’s how you shake apathy
People are more likely to engage with emotional messages over rational
Yet so many marketers focus on rational proof points
The Automotive category is not immune from this condition
For our NRMA brand we try to tap into culture and culturally relevant times to engage our audience
Each year we create a Christmas TVC focussed on the important message of road safety. We do this because Aussies are known to take to the roads at Christmas and a heartwarming story around getting to your destination safely at Christmas is more likely to engage than a comprehensive car insurance ad.
We do this at other times of the year as well. For the recent school holidays, another time Aussies are on the road, we ran this road safety campaign
We elevate our messaging beyond product, to connect and engage
This is a culturally relevant time, people are on holidays, taking road trips, quite often driving tired.
Its not a traditional road safety shock campaign and
By focussing on road safety we demonstrate our brand proposition of Help in a relevant and meaningful way
And hopefully bring a smile to peoples faces
This campaign has had huge positive feedback
So that road safety campaign generated positive engagement with people posting pictures of the different executions they saw on their travels.
We are about to launch a new initiative for home insurance, which we hope will also engage, but in a different way entirely.
I’ll give you a sneak peak
Show Koala – sneak peak of what we are about to launch
So why do we think this will work:
Culturally relevant – koala plight has been in the news a lot lately, so we are tapping into a relevant issue in people’s minds
We are doing more than talking about it, we are HELPING with partnerships, tree plantings
It’s an emotional story, that we hope people will want to engage with.
But there are ways, other than advertising you can engage….
But there are ways other than advertising you can engage…
Burger King launched their Pride campaign with The Proud Whopper
They promoted the Proud Whopper burger
People bought it, curious what was different about it
But when they unwrapped it, it revealed the words, “WE ARE ALL THE SAME INSIDE.”
The Four’N Twenty MAGIC SALAD PLATE.
In the word’s of Homer Simpson, you don’t make friends with salad
And pie lovers don’t want to eat salad with their pie
To the untrained eye, a Four’N Twenty MAGIC SALAD PLATE makes it appear that you’re eating a leafy green salad,
So pie lovers don’t need to cave in to the pressure to eat salad – and all while still looking like they totally have.
This initiative was launched by Procter & Gamble's detergent brand, Ariel in India.
Ariel’s #ShareTheLoad was founded on the burning issue of gender equality, throwing light on some daily activities that the contemporary professional women are indulged in.
The campaign has been highly awarded and has generated an enormous amount of earned media, conversation and ultimately sales growth.
ANZ has been a long term major sponsor of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras since 2007.
When they became principal partner they wanted to make a splash and deliver widespread understanding of their support and partnership with Mardi Gras.
They did this not through a traditional campaign, but through an every day touchpoint for the brand.
They turned central Sydney ATMs into dazzling GAYTMs.
Inspired by gay and lesbian culture, were installed on Sydney’s busiest streets for three weeks surrounding the Mardi Gras.
Again this generated conversation, because it was a culturally relevant statement that engaged in a fresh and interesting way.
So, even if you do focus on brand and engage in relevant and interesting ways, there is still one piece of the puzzle you need to get right, and that is budget
Allocate budget in line with opportunity size.
This will vary for each business, but don’t lose sight of this.
80/20 from IPA, their databank looks at budget splits of the most effective campaigns
So just to recap
The three solutions I believe counter low involvement are
