Co-op Insurance had 3 main products that, within the highly commoditised and competitive market, the brand wanted to increase market share; car, home and pet.
The brief also had a wider objective to increase brand awareness and brand engagement of Co-op Insurance, among both existing Co-op members and new customers.
The business incentivised the products with £50 worth of Co-op food vouchers for home and car insurance new policies and £20 for pet insurance policies.
The largest proportion was people who were middle aged or nearing retirement:
... Plus, a new younger audience – impressionable younger achievers in professional roles who were more likely to buy into the Co-op values.
The wider Co-op group had just launched a rebrand, which visually harked back to its old 1950s cloverleaf logo. Alongside this, the rebrand revisited the old values of community and doing right by the customer. People loved the rebrand so much, they were entering stores with the sole aim of buying the now famous blue cloverleaf bags for life in their thousands. This gave us fuel for thought, not just in terms of a way to appeal to a wider audience, but also as a direct route to creating a compelling proposition for a creative campaign to cover all three insurance products.
There was an underlying feeling of mistrust and a lack of transparency surrounding rising premiums within the insurance sector. We knew that through this campaign, we could address this feeling directly by tying into the group rebrand and aligning the Insurance business with those strong Co-op brand ethics, community values, and a better way of doing insurance—all delivered visually using the new Co-op branding.
This is why we created the ‘Bags more’ campaign. It was a simple, single-minded umbrella idea, and one that could be easily adapted to be more focussed on home, motor and pet insurance. Using the iconic bag as a vehicle, it was a simple way to convey both the campaign’s financial incentive—and the group brand’s values.
Bags More was delivered through an integrated direct response campaign aimed at convincing customers that getting a fair price from an insurer they could trust was better than getting the lowest price. And the campaign was so successful, it ran for 4 years, generating more customer engagement—and response than any other previous marketing efforts.
We ran the campaign over four years, and before each new year we carried out a period of analysis aimed at continuously improving output and results from the previous year.
This was supported by conducting new photoshoots and refreshing ad copy, SEO copy and microcopy on-site to achieve such improvement.
Our activity through ATL channels (press, press inserts, door drops) increased response rates by 90%.
Digital marketing activity saw overall clicks increase by 3% and CTR up 30%.
Direct mail activity increased overall response rates by 8% YOY, and quotes were up 15% YOY – the brand’s best dm results, ever.
Another of the key measures of success was how members and customers behaved and felt about the Co-op Insurance brand compared to the previous year.
To reinforce our drive of continuous improvement for the brand, an independent brand tracking survey was carried out. This looked at the campaign period compared to the previous year, and revealed the following data:
Proud to partner with
