Beazley has been touring America with a massive billboard that features a bowler hat and a big pink bus.
It is on the road right now, and will continue till November, promoting the insurer and all it wants to stand for to US brokers.
If you are curious to see how they put the bus together, there is more here.
https://www.beazley.com/en-US/anniversary/about-anniversary/
This is a fun campaign in an industry not known for hilarity. I can remember just two insurance adverts – the Direct Line red phone, and Commercial Union’s “We Won’t Make a Drama out of a Crisis”.
(Customers of the CU didn’t always think the marketing matched the reality.)
Anyway, Beazley’s attempt to make insurance interesting is going well. A home run, in American parlance.Beazley’s founders set out to, as the company says, “do insurance differently”, but there is always a big gap between saying something and actually doing it.
The bus is a physical manifestation of the corporate intention.
The idea was to build brand awareness, reinforce its stance as a different sort of insurer, and to drive business growth.
That marketing can be an asset rather than just an expense is what marketers strive to prove. This one might even work. This is brand marketing – building a connection with customers – rather than simple buy-one-get-one-free performance marketing.
Perhaps we could call it the John Lewis model – no one hasn’t been sometimes moved, even if they try not to be, by one of the retailer’s Christmas ads.
Even if you never shop there, you’re aware of what it wants to be about.
Georgina Peters-Venzano, the Beazley marketing chief, tells me the idea was to get face to face with the brokers who are its customers.
To recreate the idea of the Lloyd’s Coffee House from 1686 when business was done in person. (Internet connections were very slow back then.)
She says: “Brokers are humans as well. They also need to be communicated with. They have choice like any consumer. They need to know there is a real reason to come to you.”
I assumed the pink colour of the bus was a diversity statement. Actually, pink is the Beazley corporate colour, as opposed to the usual greens, blues and blacks that financial services firms typically prefer.
The bowler hat too, which we might associate with the defunct Bradford & Bingley, is part of Beazley’s corporate identity. They didn’t just invent it for this campaign.
How you get brand presence in insurance, how you do storytelling when you sell a product that is connected to risks and disasters, is one of the industry’s biggest challenges.
The thing is to come up with something accessible that is also grounded in good business sense, that shows strategic value to audiences internal and external.
It’s a good effort by Beazley and a challenge to rivals.
Over to them…