Article written by ICG member Graham Booth, Movement.
The IPA’s Effies awards recognise campaigns that have made a measurable business difference, evidenced by robust submissions that are forensically examined by experts in the field. Success is driven by fresh strategic thinking, realised through original creative ideas, supported by clients with clear objectives and an openness to producing advertising that challenges convention. And the best qualitative development research can play a critical role in getting them there.
The first article in this series explained the role my research played in the development of the EBS campaign that last year won a silver in the Finance & Insurance Services category of the Irish Effies – no golds were awarded. In this second article, I will talk you through the Allianz campaign that won a silver Effie for the brand and its agency, Forsman & Bodenfors, in the Sustained Effectiveness category.
In 2019, with arrival of a new CEO and CFO who understood and valued brand strength, Allianz and its agency embarked on their mission to rebuild Allianz’s position in the Irish market. Allianz has been in Ireland for over 100 years but, in recent years, insufficient brand investment and an undifferentiated brand positioning had resulted in stagnant growth and very low trust scores. So, Marketing was challenged with creating a sustainable and differentiated brand position to drive long-term growth for Allianz in what is a notoriously low-interest category.
Going against category norms, Allianz sought to differentiate itself by reframing insurance as ‘a positive force that enables customers to live fully. Not cautiously.’ The campaign launched in 2019, on the platform ‘We Cover Courage’. However, COVID and lockdowns had a negative impact on consumer confidence, and by 2021 it had become clear that a new iteration of the strategy was needed.
This is when I became involved, called in by Mark Brennan, who joined Allianz in 2021 as Head of Marketing from AIB, where we had worked together on many brand and comms development projects. Over the next couple of years, I worked with Allianz and Forsman to apply research to the development of new advertising that propelled Allianz from 6th to 3rd place in terms of spontaneous brand awareness and moved it from having the lowest trust scores to the highest. Commercial confidentiality prevents me from giving you specific figures
on business performance, but I can tell you that, over the period 2019-24, Allianz grew market share and experienced double-digit policy growth year-on-year.
How did research contribute to this success?
In late 2021, we researched two alternative approaches to re-energising the campaign. Reactions to one of the routes revealed issues about the explicit advocacy of ‘courage’ in relation to insurance. Allianz is heavily involved in sport through sponsorship and funding, and the idea focused on the brand’s support of the courage shown by Paralympic athletes and football and GAA players. However, while this was not disputed, insurance was not seen as an active choice that requirescourage, particularly in the obligatory and commoditised categories of motor and home.
Reactions to the second route, however, showed that it had the potential to much more effectively convey how trusted insurance cover from Allianz could empower customers, by bringing to life the idea that cover from Allianz supports the choices people make in their lives.This was a classic case where the script researched was far from the finished article, but the response to certain elements indicated how the concept could be developed to maximise its relevance and differentiation.
People had very little awareness of Allianz’s scale and longevity, both factors that engender trust in an insurer. Against this background, the research revealed the potential the advertising had to build trust by making people aware that Allianz had insured some of the world’s most ambitious and iconic projects, such as the building of the Golden Gate bridge. However, while this offered a dramatic example of how Allianz’s support could enable people to make dreams become reality, the research also showed the need to feature alongside these achievements more personal, Irish stories, so that people could gain the sense that they too could realise their dreams when backed by Allianz.
Forsman & Bodenfors fully embraced the development direction coming out of the research to create the first film on the new brand platform, beautifully summarised in the line ‘You Write It. We Underwrite It’.
Further success came with the next film in the campaign, designed to demonstrate Allianz’s support for self-determination in the field of sport, but in a very different way to what had gone before.
We researched four potential routes and reactions gave the lie to the all-too-often repeated trope that people in focus groups prefer the safety of familiar ideas. In my experience nothing could be further from the truth, and reactions to these ideas lent further proof.
Two routes were well understood as celebrating that the greatest rewards from sport come not from winning but from taking part. However, there was little enthusiasm for this approach in the groups, both scripts being seen as rather generic.
What connected much more strongly were two routes that addressed the issue of kids dropping out of sport. Between primary and secondary school, one in five children give up sport altogether, which has multiple implications, not just for health and fitness but also for people’s sense of community, life skills and simple joy.
Again, one of these two routes felt executionally familiar. However, the other route knocked it out of the park.
The film followed one disenchanted young girl as she discarded her sports kit, before revealing that hers was but a tiny contribution to a literal mountain of abandoned equipment. By focusing on one child’s journey and keeping the reason for quitting open to interpretation, people were able to see their own children in this story. And while her frustration is personal to her, the huge pile of kit showed that she was not alone: many thousands of children had felt that same frustration and made the sad decision to give up on sport altogether.
Responses to the idea in research clearly showed how the use in advertising of metaphor, symbolism and exaggeration can create impact, engagement and memorability. The mountain of kit was seen as a powerful and memorable symbol of the high number of kids that have given up sport, as well as the diverse range of sports to which this applies. And ‘Stop the Drop’, was felt to be a very apt and memorable campaign phrase.
Allianz – Stop the Drop – click on image to play
The Allianz case study shows how insightful, human-powered development research can provide clear direction for the development of highly effective advertising. None of the scripts that we took into these two research projects would have achieved the impact they had without considerable further development. But through appropriate exploration of responses and careful analysis of feedback, interpreted through a deep understanding of how advertising is processed by real people to create engagement and build brands, I was able to provide clear direction for the development of the final films that helped maximise their effectiveness.
In my final word, I should also emphasise that none of this would have been possible without the open-mindedness and willingness to apply the learning coming out of research demonstrated by both client and agency, ingredients that are always essential to the creation of campaigns that make a difference.