Prudential Relationship Index
No matter where you’re from, life is ultimately about relationships. The good ones, the bad ones, their abundance or their absence – every life is played out in the context of how we relate to one another.
For Prudential Corporation Asia (Prudential Asia), the regional operation of global life insurance company Prudential, relationships are a key business driver because they often provide the motivation for purchasing insurance: to protect and provide for those we love.
With this in mind, Prudential Asia embarked upon a major campaign to reposition itself as the relationship company. The concept behind the campaign was to remind consumers in Asian markets that their relationships are important and to encourage them to understand their relationships better.
At the outset, Prudential Asia had a relatively straightforward plan: conduct research into relationships in Asia to get a handle on this topic and then use these insights to develop a marketing campaign to position itself as a champion for relationships.
Prudential Asia engaged Ruder Finn to initiate this campaign. Daylight was initially brought in to develop the campaign’s digital assets, but our role quickly expanded as the project scope grew.
Asia is home to incredible diversity in terms of cultures, languages and relationships, which represented both a cornerstone of this campaign and a key challenge for its implementation. Faced with such diversity, our client sought the help of Daylight and our project collaborators (Ruder Finn, Daylight, Ipsos, iProspect) to position Prudential Asia in a consistent way across 9 very different markets: Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
As we began to plan the work for this campaign, it became apparent that the state of relationships in Asia is an important and wide-ranging topic worthy of in-depth exploration and extensive conversations. Rather than doing research to inform and guide the marketing campaign, we realised that the research could become the campaign.
Planning & Execution
Based on this insight, we developed a new strategy: to use comprehensive, in-depth research on relationships in Asia as a vehicle for positioning Prudential Asia as a thought leader in this field. In doing so, we aimed to create valuable opportunities for Prudential Asia to engage in discussions with existing and prospective customers and other key stakeholders by shifting the conversation from products to people.
Objectives:
1. Gain a deep understanding of personal relationships in Asia, developing quantitative metrics for scoring them and focusing on the variation across markets.
2. Adapt to the needs and realities of each individual market in Asia while maintaining strong and consistent branding for Prudential Asia across the region.
3. Encourage active engagement with the topic of relationships within each market’s local population, generating two-way dialogue rather than one-way marketing communications.
Driven by our strategy to transform Prudential Asia into an authority on relationships in Asia, we greatly expanded the scope of this project beyond its original form into a multi-faceted campaign. Every element was designed to reinforce Prudential Asia’s positioning as the relationship company.
For this to succeed amid Asia’s diversity, we needed to ensure that every element of the campaign was appropriately localised for each target market. This involved close coordination between our team, Prudential Asia, local Prudential business units and the other agencies collaborating on the execution of this campaign.
Prudential Relationship Index (PRI). Initially intended as background research, we worked with our project partners to turn this into a flagship study for Prudential Asia. The focus was on understanding personal relationships in different Asian markets and developing quantitative metrics for scoring them.
The PRI study encompassed three main components, discussed below.
- Localisation: Each component of the PRI study was adapted to the local markets in terms of language and visuals, while maintaining consistent branding.
- Surveys: We worked with Ipsos to plan and conduct a survey of over 5,000 interviewees in July 2016 in the nine markets covered by the study. The survey was consistent across all markets – focusing on what individuals need from relationships and how well their existing relationships meet those needs – but it was translated into each market’s local language. Ipsos spearheaded the research while we led the digital deployment of the survey.
- Microsites: For all nine countries, we built a local PRI microsite capable of toggling between English and the dominant local language. Each site presents key local findings and makes the PRI report available for download.
- Videos: We produced a video for each market that was filmed locally to introduce the campaign and provide key data points relevant to the local audience.
- Social media advertising: We promoted the PRI campaign with targeted advertising on Facebook, LinkedIn and WeChat, adapted to each local market.
Social media quizzes. We conceptualised and developed two social media quizzes aimed at encouraging conversations about relationships. We designed the quizzes as collaborative games, with individuals inviting a family member or friend to complete the quiz with them. Both participants answered questions and receive scores, revealing insights about their shared relationship and tying these in with the PRI study findings.
- Localisation: The quizzes were adapted to each local market in terms of language and to ensure the content reflected local cultural norms. We also adapted to different technological needs, using WeChat as the quiz platform in China and Facebook in all other markets.
Panel discussions. To reinforce Prudential Asia’s position as a supporter of healthy relationships, we organised a series of panel discussions where the survey results were shared and analysed. These events also provided an opportunity for the public to ask relationship-related questions directly to a panel of experts. The panel discussions were livestreamed on Facebook to reach a wider audience.
Effectiveness / Results
Though ongoing, the campaign is set to exceed all KPIs. Microsites tracked more than 161K minutes spent over at least 121K sessions from upwards of 90K unique visitors and counting.
Video views exceeded 3 million views, with more than 6,000 participants of the The Relationship Quiz and counting, and reaching up to 80,000 active Facebook users participating in just one of the Facebook Live panel discussions.
Analysis available (Q4, 2016, Millward Brown, Singapore and Philippines) shows average 51% awareness of Index across target groups, 13% higher brand consideration and 19% higher level of willingness to speak to an agent. While final performance data/traffic results still being gathered, 50% of Prudential Index markets have already delivered 75% of total campaign KPI goals.