Client: FirstCall Group

Project: Launch and promotion of Auto Insure

Synopsis: FirstCall Group had just opened for business, offering financial services in the key areas of insurance brokerage, property mortgage, and micro-finance. It was mass market focused and aimed to reach millions of consumers with a combination of above and below-the-line communications. Its business model was fairly unique and it was to thrive on creating extra value for the thousands of consumers of financial services at the individual level who do not get premium treatment from the big established financial organisations.

Situation Analysis: First Call being a new organisation was looking for a strategic market penetration scheme that will launch it into the desired end of the market. The company, as a group, operates in both financial and property sectors of the economy. It was confronted with the challenge of disrupting the market with its unique services and products. To achieve its objective, it chose to launch itself into the market through a corporate and product launch mechanism by introducing new automated vehicle third party insurance scheme, brand-named Auto-Insure. The innovative product falls under the AutoReg Scheme. It desires a brand marketing and corporate communication agency that can achieve the stated task. The organisation contracted our consultancy to deliver the task.

The Challenge: Create a cost effective plan to launch the corporate brand into the market. Credibility is key as the financial sector requires a great degree of trust from the user.

Our Strategy: Consultancy advised against client’s plan to launch FirstCall directly into the market. Fortunately this is a listening client with a great degree of trust in our capabilities. We discovered that FirstCall’s contributory mortgage scheme, targeted at middle and lower middle class individuals, might fail to achieve enough convinced converts except we were able to demonstrate that this is a very credible brand. We found out that client had actually finished work on a new brand. That was it! Our ultimate solution was to launch this product ahead of the corporate brand because it was jointly owned by a battery of strong, well known brands. In launching the new product, emphasis was also on FirstCall. The name had to be mentioned within the first paragraph, along with the other already well established brands.

Tactics: A well attended press conference was organised to present the new product, Autoinsure, and by extension, FirstCall. The event had in attendance representatives of Oceanic Bank and 5 top insurance companies who were partners in the project. The logic is clear: this number of quality names will not associate with a company that lacks credibility. This approach not only created credibility for the brand, it also increased media interest in the FirstCall story.

Consultancy followed up with robust content emphasising the unique partnership and seizing on the moment to drive FirstCall into the mind of potential customers as a dependable and creative provider of financial services.

To begin direct recruitment, consultancy conceived of and executed a major road show that worked through major areas of Lagos. The identified objective of the roadshow was to attack clusters of private and commercial vehicles, and operatives at major parks and terminals. This roadshow also had participation of all the major organisations involved, further driving home the point.

Results: Enquiries peaked in the initial one month period at about 150 per day, up from about 10 per day without an increase in advertising budget or a change of strategy for communicating the contact numbers. It became obvious that despite a healthy advertising budget in deployment, people did not feel sufficiently convinced until they saw the new PR and event activation. The PR and Road show activation was so successful that client had to call for a suspension after a period of 4 weeks of continuous leveraging. It turned out that Client was not prepared for the number of enquiries coming in.