“Challenger is in our DNA”: Libby Goodsearles, Head of Marketing at Homeprotect
Insurance is a complex category; oftentimes, it’s virtually impossible for the average consumer to understand, let alone purchase. 20-year-old Challenger brand Homeprotect is aiming to shake up the industry and carve a name for itself as the go-to insurer for everyone – no matter their insurability according to the top players in the market. Libby Goodsearles, Head of Marketing at Homeprotect, talks to eatbigfish about their recent work with us, and explains how their new brand identity harnesses the brand’s inherent Challenger Mindset.
What’s the background of Homeprotect, what niche is it filling?
Homeprotect are home insurance specialists. We just do home insurance and we’re experts in it. What makes us different to other players in the market is our ability to offer insurance for those properties which may struggle to secure policies with traditional providers, such as homes with a history of flooding, unoccupied and holiday homes or people with poor credit, financial problems or previous convictions.
Your average big insurer can only insure about 70% of properties and there's this huge 30% that they won’t insure. What makes us different is that we can insure 97% of UK homes. One of the reasons for this is because we built our own bespoke piece of technology called Cortex, which analyses the risks and works out the optimal product and price to charge. Cortex works quite differently than your average insurance pricing system and is able to adjust our product to suit every situation. This means it’s possible for us to insure a much broader variety of properties and at a better price than many of our competitors.
“Homeprotect was founded in 2002 on a simple principle – to provide protection to people underserved by the home insurance industry.”
I'll give you an example: when an insurer is working out how likely your house is to flood, a lot of them will just look at your whole postcode, whereas we'll look at your individual property. That’s because you might live next door to the River Thames, but you're in a flat on the third floor. It's super unlikely that your flat is going to flood, but a lot of insurance companies will look at your flat and say, ‘Ah, look, if that’s the first four digits of your postcode, no chance for you.’
We were one of the first ever insurers on some of the price comparison websites and even for those with unusual or complex requirements, most people can get a quote and purchase online with us, which suits those who want to do everything online. We have always had a call centre - and more recently introduced web chat with our customer service team - so that if you do want to speak to a real human over the phone or online, you can. This is a differentiator compared to other insurers, and it was central to a part of our new positioning around how we do things: ‘Real people, smart tech’.
Homeprotect’s new logo
What was the situation at Homeprotect that led you to do the new brand identity work with eatbigfish?
Internally, we realized that we weren't all joined up when it came to what our company was about. And that was a problem. The other thing was that historically, we were very good at planning out our objectives for growth but didn't have an agreed brand identity. We didn’t have our who, what, or why articulated in a clear, succinct way and we hadn’t done the work to really interrogate what made us unique. What that meant was that we were missing that one thing to go back to in order to make decisions.
So, there were those two reasons, and then externally, there was another big reason. We have our own risk rating model and we are constantly improving that to provide lower prices for our customers. Our research shows that people looking for home insurance almost always just pick the cheapest brand they've heard of. But this was actually a problem for us because whilst we were becoming more and more competitive on price, because no one had heard of us, we were losing sales to those bigger brands, even though they might have worse review scores, a lower quality product or a poorer customer experience. The difference was that they were well known. We knew that we needed to increase our brand awareness but because our brand identity wasn't clear internally, it obviously wasn't clear externally, either. We went through the process of defining our brand strategy which eatbigfish helped us with - from looking at customer insight to workshops with our internal teams - and then we worked together to take that strategy and develop it into a compelling new visual identity and set of brand assets.
What does Homeprotect stand for now?
Our focus is on empowering people to protect their homes and the things they love. Our customer research uncovered the insight that if you do struggle to get insurance, you just feel completely disempowered. So, we flipped that on its head – how do we turn getting insurance from this process where it can often feel frustrating and confusing into a process that makes people feel empowered? We didn’t rank brilliantly for transparency – we immediately saw that we needed to fix this, because it’s almost impossible to feel empowered by your purchase if it’s not clear what you’re buying. We set about completely rewriting our policy booklet, as well as redesigning and rebuilding our quote journey – restructuring text, adding in clearer summaries of what is and isn’t covered and highlighting fees where applicable. As a result, we’ve now been ranked first place for transparency in the home insurance market.
When it came to communicating our brand positioning externally, we had this ‘aha’ moment about the 30% of people that struggle to get covered. These customers traditionally get referred to as ‘non-standard’ by the insurance industry. We realised that being a ‘non-standard’ customer is basically a really frustrating experience. You just get a lot of computer says “No”, and it isn't a nice way to be described. Many insurers actively don’t want your business. But for Homeprotect it’s the opposite, catering for more unusual needs is what we do and so we reimagined our ‘who’ as ‘unique as standard’ to highlight how we’re able to insure unusual properties and circumstances just as easily as any other.
For our first brand campaign, which we worked on with independent creative studio, Ourselves, our strapline was about how we can cover almost every home - so in our advert we take a light-hearted look at the 3% that we can't insure, for example a home perched on a cliff edge, a kid’s Wendy house or a house without a roof. Our aim was to emphasize the wide range of properties and circumstances we can insure, by showcasing the very extreme ones we can’t. This approach also played on the insight we had that most home insurance ads are really bland and focus on fear and disruption, for example showing things going wrong like wine being spilt on the carpet or a house flooding, for example. We couldn’t see anyone in home insurance taking a more light-hearted approach - other than through the category trope of mascots or characters, which is now very old. So, we saw this as a great way to bring a new voice and unique positioning to the market, to help us create cut-through with a distinctive ad that also amplified the idea of empowerment and shows you can take the product seriously without taking yourselves too seriously. Ourselves were a great partner for us - they helped us to take the new brand positioning and identity that we’d worked on with eatbigfish and then turn that into a really compelling and distinctive creative platform for our first TV and outdoor campaign.
Why was tapping into your Challenger DNA so crucial to the process?
After reading Eating the Big Fish, I realised that we are a Challenger brand, I just hadn't thought of us in that way before. It's part of our DNA, having been one of the first home insurers to specialise in ‘non-standard’ properties or circumstances right from the very beginning, which was the opposite to most other insurers who started mainstream. We were not really making the most of that point of difference. As a Challenger brand, you have to accept and even celebrate the fact that you’re not for everyone.
Homeprotect’s Outdoor Campaign
I love working for a Challenger brand. When you're a smaller company, you can get things done faster and with fewer barriers. You can take risks when larger companies can't. You also have the opportunity to be a bit bolder and have less institutionalised thinking. Your brand has the ability to be the change about something that you don't like about your category.
How does your position as a Challenger help you to know what to sacrifice in order to overcommit to what’s really important to the company?
We use our new brand identity as our North Star on decisions and determining what we will or won’t do. For example, what changes to the platform will or won’t work for our brand. We’ve got over 120 staff now, and we’re growing fast but we’re still really lean, and we have to prioritise. One of the learnings that came out of the brand work was about the importance of connecting with our customers, even for a product that is quite commoditised, and thinking about how we can dial up that connection all the way through the customer experience. We’ve got a chunk of our customers that don't want to phone us. They just want to buy their insurance and not speak to anyone. But we've got another chunk of customers that do want to speak to someone, because insurance can be complicated, particularly if you have an unusual property or complicated circumstances.
One of the things we’ve focused on is always giving people the option to speak to a human - whether that’s over the phone or more recently via live web chat, rather than with an AI bot. While AI bots might free up our team to do other things, we know that the human connection is really important to our customers. Sometimes, you just want to ask someone “What does this actually mean?” This is a practical example of how the part of our brand positioning around ‘real people, smart tech’ really shows up in the customer journey.
The insurance industry is complicated – how does Homeprotect use its Challenger Mindset to navigate the landscape?
We basically live the idea of A Beautiful Constraint. For example, you could look at regulation as “Oh, this makes things more complicated.” or “Now it's harder to make changes.” But when you flip that you realize it's an opportunity. The whole industry lives by the same regulation, so for us it’s how can we do this better than everyone else? Because the playing field is level, how do we do it smarter? And for me, that's one of the things that makes working at a Challenger brand in financial services fun because we all get the same challenge, but who's going to react the best? Who is going to make the biggest difference to customers?
What’s been the impact of the new brand identity and what’s next?
Well, we all enjoyed the project so much and we’re all really proud of the outcome. When we make a decision now, we refer back to our brand identity as our guide and we consider whether what we’re planning aligns to our brand strategy before doing anything on top of that, our conversion rate on our website (so the people who come directly onto homeprotect.co.uk) went up 14% off the back of it.
Going forward, we're continuing our project of becoming better and better value for everyone across that whole spectrum of uniqueness and to increase our brand awareness. We’re on this journey from focusing solely on performance marketing to balancing that with more mid and upper funnel activity to help grow our longer-term brand awareness and make Homeprotect better known, so we can help more people insure their homes and the things they love, regardless of their property type or circumstances.