Direct Line Group
Red Saturday
Understanding the relationship between a cultural moment and contents insurance
Direct Line’s typical strategy, alongside other insurers, has always been to target prospects when they were due for a renewal and therefore in the market for insurance. But this relies heavily on hand raisers and ignores a whole raft of individuals – people who haven’t got insurance in the first place.
With sales periods such as Black Friday and January Sales fuelling big ticket purchases across the UK, these events provided a large-scale opportunity to hijack cultural triggers when we knew people were buying new items, in a moment when we knew they’d be feeling an emotional connection with them.
We created ‘Red Saturday’, an event to complement rather than compete with Black Friday, forming an instant connection with the Direct Line brand.
RECOGNITION
DMA Awards – Gold for Best Financial Service
DMA Awards – Bronze for Best Use of Email
UK households have on average £35k worth of contents in their home, but 25% have no contents insurance cover at all. We discovered that under-insuring is as much an emotional behaviour as it is rational. Some people don’t feel that they have a lot (even though they might have games consoles, bikes, laptops etc.) or they don’t feel a huge emotional attachment to the things they do have. We recognised we needed to make people not only think but feel differently about their contents and insuring them.
We started to think about triggers that might tug on the latent emotional drivers that underpin insurance purchases. There is a self-evident truth that people feel more protective over their belongings immediately after purchase.
The campaign exceeded expectations, both in the first iteration of Red Saturday, and January Sales, throughout the sales funnel.
The combined campaigns resulted in:
Worth of gross written premium
£902k
Additional quotes
14,974
Uplift in email open rates
219%
