The Most Disastrous Campaign Ever
Summary
Over three years, Hiscox’s focus on short-term sales and conservative communications led to declining brand metrics and rising costs. To reverse this trend, Hiscox aimed to increase brand awareness and reignite growth.
Guided by our key insights revealing significant commonality among SMEs and the critical importance of awareness regarding the risks of being underinsured or uninsured, we created a campaign that reached the entire small business insurance market across OOH, a blank Metro cover, an engaging WeTransfer takeover, WeWork domination and disruptive radio ads.
Despite the campaign’s apparent “disastrous” nature, the results were far from it, with Hiscox seeing a 52% increase in unaided brand awareness, a 47% increase in brand keyword searches and a 16% growth in sales, leading to their highest-ever annual profit.
Challenge
In a cluttered market with a focus on performance marketing, Hiscox’s shift to lower funnel customer acquisition had initially supported short-term sales, but at the expense of long-term brand building and business growth.
Over three years, cautious and conservative communications contributed to diminishing brand metrics and increased costs, prompting a need for strategic reversal.
Hiscox needed to regain its mojo, to proudly declare its resurgence, whilst increasing awareness and sales. But in a low-interest and highly competitive market where standard activity can be easily ignored, how could Hiscox make itself unmissable despite not having the lofty budgets of big-name high street insurers?
Solution
We uncovered two critical insights: despite previous assumptions, there was a 91% correlation between Hiscox’s customers and its competitors in both their attitudes and behaviours. Alongside this, our research uncovered that risk awareness was the key barrier stopping businesses from getting insured.
Collaborating with Uncommon Creative Studio, we launched a fame-building campaign targeting the small business insurance market with unmissable ads, using contextually relevant mistakes to link in with our insights that would jolt business owners into action.
We orchestrated the UK’s largest special build OOH campaign and the Metro featured our bespoke cover wrap with a shockingly blank front page. We took over WeTransfer for multiple days, highlighting the risk of sharing confidential info, as well as dominating screens at WeWork locations nationwide for months.
Results
The campaign was completely “disastrous”; the results were not! After the first year we’ve seen a 52% increase in unaided brand awareness, a 47% increase in brand keyword searches and a 16% growth in sales, leading to Hiscox’s highest-ever annual profit and boosting internal morale, with staff citing it as a source of pride. Alongside this, the campaign has been reported by the likes of City AM, Insurance Age and Insurance Post, all of whom reference the impact of this brand campaign.
“We’re incredibly proud of this campaign and the smart and strategic media thinking behind it. By taking the time to properly understand what makes our audience tick and how to bust insurance category norms, we’ve been able to deliver a campaign that punches significantly above its weight. We can already see the positive effect on both brand and commercial metrics.”
Ed Birth, Head of Brand Marketing,
Hiscox UK