To put right damaging perceptions, Tower championed its challenger spirit and ultimately attracted growth.
The Challenge
Seen as just another insurance company that’s old, traditional, and a struggle to deal with, Tower Insurance had some work to do.
The insurer has a 140-year-old history in New Zealand, having started in a Kiwi pub by a bunch of mates who decided they were fed up with overseas insurance companies taking advantage of New Zealanders.
They believed Kiwis deserved better and it was time to reawaken that belief.
Since then, the company has undergone substantial changes in structure and management direction but that challenger spirit remains at its heart.
In order to change perceptions, it had to dig that spirit back up.
The Response
To break away from the crowd and undo damaging brand perceptions, Tower needed to make things simple – from its process to customer interaction and brand message.
In 2016, a new executive team took this thinking and implemented changes including:
- Introducing the simplest online sign-up process in market.
- Reducing 440 products to a three-tiered product set.
- Simplifying the language within policies.
- Enhancing the claims’ experience to make it even simpler to get bad things undone.
However, these changes weren’t going to shift perceptions alone and so a new brand platform was born. That platform championed Tower’s mission to do its utmost to keep insurance simple and set things right. The message was so simple, it could be summed up by the ‘undo’ keyboard shortcut, and so the ‘undo’ idea was translated into a distinctive visual style for it to use across broadcast and direct channels.
And armed with the knowledge that its competitors usually reduce their spend in summer, Tower unleashed a digitally-led campaign to take advantage of the quiet space in the market. It highlighted existing policy benefits by showing how it can undo common New Zealand summer mishaps through the executions ‘Poolside’, ‘Road Trip’ and ‘Backyard Cricket Cover’.
To help target the right people with the right message, an advanced audience model categorised consumers into 30 different categories based on data layers such as helix personas, what type of product the audience was interested in, and their position in the sales funnel.
Next, Tower used its own display management system to automatically tailor creative to consumers. The system eliminates the tracking and production costs of updating banners. On top of this, a data-driven attribution model assigned value to all its digital touchpoints, giving Tower a deeper insight into which placements were converting high-value customers, and which weren’t ultimately increasing efficiency. To back up the campaign, there was an offer to reward customers for simplifying their insurance by offering a 20 percent discount when they packaged their policies.
The Result
Tower’s new marketing platform helped it to break away from the crowd and ‘undo’ damaging brand perceptions.
With New Zealanders taking a fresh look at Tower, there was an average percentage increase of 33 percent for those who see Tower as simple and easy.
These new perceptions resulted in impressive growth across the board.
Category
Consumer Products & Services
Company
Tower Insurance
Marketing Initiative
Tower Undo
Marketing Partners
BC&F Dentsu
Judge’s Comment
“This entry demonstrated clear insights and a coherent approach, making the complex simple. We liked the inside out philosophy, with excellent self-awareness resulting in alignment of internal service delivery, creating a compelling platform for the communications campaign. The results are outstanding.”
Finalists
Northern Arena, The Tomorrow Project, Cheers! / Uber New Zealand
