United Utilities. Customer Engagement
Challenge:
As part of United Utilities’ ongoing customer engagement, they wanted the people of the North West to help shape their future business plans. Customers in general are fairly apathetic towards their water provider. They tend only to engage when there are issues with their water supply or their bill. But a water company actually has a greater impact in the region than people think. United Utilities challenged us to create a campaign that reached into all these aspects of the business and encouraged customers to have their say about what the company's future priorities should be.
Approach:
Our single-minded thought was: ‘you care more about what we do than you think’.
Instead of talking about what the company does in corporate terms, we spoke to real people across the North West and asked them about their real priorities. From a farmer looking after his crops and livestock and a nurse hoping for good service for elderly or vulnerable patients, we gathered a whole range of responses. These real stories were used to connect emotionally with our customers and get them thinking about how United Utilities' operations impacted on their lives.
We selected the channels that would encourage dialogue, settling on social media (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) and local events throughout the region.
Outcome:
We drove 96,755 interactions with the public over a two-month period. Interactions could be anything from viewing the campaign video, to engaging with our local events, to completing the survey. The total number of completed surveys was 10,854, greatly exceeding our target.
Client feedback:
“The strategy that Delineo proposed really helped us engage with customers on a wide variety of topics. The unifying insight that our customers have a deeper relationship with United Utilities than they think really helped focus the campaign strategy and bring together an integrated approach across off and online channels. Delineo’s creative approach to the strategy ensured it was brought to life in an engaging and genuine way, resulting in much higher engagements than we see on an average campaign.”
MattTasker, United Utilities Digital Manager
The Transpennine Route Upgrade - On Track to Better
Challenge:
The Transpennine Route Upgrade is a mammoth infrastructure project to make rail travel across the North faster, greener and more frequent. Working to a coalition of industry partners, including regional train operators and Network Rail, The&Partnership Manchester developed a fully integrated campaign to communicate the benefits and offset negative PR about inevitable service disruption.
Approach:
We needed to deliver a multi-media campaign across TV, OOH, Radio, Social, Digital and Owned Channels. In the simplest terms, when it comes to travel, “me” matters more than “we”. There was a clear opportunity to break through the region’s scepticism by linking rail improvements to the reasons people travel.
When we think about faster trains, we’re not thinking about millions of journeys getting shortened. We’re thinking about getting home to our kids faster. We’re thinking about discovering new places in the countryside with the sun on our face. We’re thinking about not having to rush our cup of tea in the morning.
Focusing on these everyday benefits gave an obvious way to connect to the project for our key audiences. And our animated ‘model world’ creative brought the project to life with charm and warmth, a welcome counterpoint to the soulless corporate messaging and heavy industrial imagery that typifies the category.
Outcome:
For an entirely new brand, spontaneous awareness of the campaign grew from 30% of travellers in core cities in the first wave to 44% in the second wave. When prompted, awareness increased to 67%. Understanding of TRU’s benefits followed suit. The public already expected some outcomes, like faster trains, but didn’t know about others, such as electrification before the campaign.
Awareness of benefits featured in comms:
Faster Trains - Pre-Campaign: 47% - Post-Campaign: 68%
More Seats - Pre-Campaign: 41% - Post-Campaign: 51%
Electrification - Pre-Campaign: 17% - Post-Campaign: 43%
This made it clear that we were landing our three key messages, cementing the public’s expectations of quicker, more frequent trains and introducing electrification. As awareness increased, belief did too.
Belief in delivery of benefits featured in comms:
Faster Trains - Pre-Campaign: 47% - Post-Campaign: 60%
More Seats - Pre-Campaign: 32% - Post-Campaign: 51%
Electrification - Pre-Campaign: 28% - Post-Campaign: 50%
Castlefield. The Thoughtful Investor.
Challenge:
Following its mergers with Barchester Green Investments and Gaeia, Castlefield had ambitions to grow the UK market for responsible and ethical investing.
They needed a fresh new brand positioning to reconnect with their audience, reinforcing their established reputation for hand-crafted personal service, while celebrating the combined strength of the enlarged business.
Approach:
Even the word ‘exclusive’ seems too ecumenical to adequately describe Castlefield’s audience.
It’s a given that they are “high net worth individuals”. But the Castlefield investor tends to value their individuality more than material wealth, favouring the bespoke over the designer label; the classic over the neoteric. They eschew ostentation and despise all things “bling”. And Castlefield’s typical investor reserves a similar disdain for any conspicuous marketing effort.
So engaging their interest was a delicate exercise.
Outcome:
“The Thoughtful Investor” made a dual reference to the audience's strident individuality, and to the ethos of “growth not greed” which remains central to Castlefield’s approach. The new logo was inspired by a Roman word square, unearthed by archaeologists yards from Castlefield’s offices.
The assets we designed celebrated the artisan and idiosyncratic – attention to detail was key, right down to a suite of email signatures.
· Brand positioning
· New logo, identity and strapline
· Website design
· Product and service brochures
· Business stationery
Fiat. The Perfect Van For You
Challenge:
Fiat vans were moving away from radio advertising. We needed to retain interest in the brand and highlight the little known features to users who thought we had nothing new to say. With a range of vehicles from compacts to large panel vans, the campaign message was that whatever your business: "We've got the perfect van for you". But we needed to create a 'cult presence' for Fiat, to rival that surrounding Ford's iconic Transit.
Knowing that the target audience were avid football supporters, we bought a weekly media pack comprising mastheads, page footers and half page press ads in the Supergoals supplement of The Sun. The mastheads and footers carried the campaign line. And the half-pagers showed a different satirical cartoon every week, depicting the "perfect van" for a team that had been in the news.
Approach:
The client was bold enough to include humorous captions, trumpeting spurious features like "lawnmower engine for stuttering starts", as long as we also mentioned some of the real specifications. A lot of the fun came in working out how the vehicle's real features might contribute to a team's performance. For instance, when Wolverhampton conceded six goals, we highlighted: "12 cubic metre capacity for letting loads in". I drew the cartoon vans every week (42 in all). As well as appearing in newspapers, we printed them on mugs, coasters and other promotional materials and merchandise.
UGC, Likes and Shares, years before the advent of Facebook
Like Fiat's hi-tech drivetrain, the tongue-in-cheek campaign gained immediate traction. And it turned out that I wasn't the only satirical van cartoonist in the country. In no time at all the client was inundated with other submissions from football-loving amateur artists everywhere. Many of their gags were too offensive to repeat, but some of the drawings were really superb. We embraced the behaviour by creating an interactive website that mimicked the Sun's tabloid format - right down to the pun-filled headlines. Simple online tools allowed visitors to create and submit their own "perfect vans" for teams of their choice. These were uploaded into an online gallery and could be shared with friends and rival supporters via email and entered into a prize draw to win Premiership tickets.
Outcome:
The campaign took off and the competition was promoted at dealerships with merchandise, including calendars, mugs and t-shirts.
- The campaign was honoured at Creative Circle and the Direct Marketing Association awards.
- I even picked up a gong for my drawings in the 'illustration' category.
- Tens of thousands entered the competition to win Premiership tickets.
- The campaign generated plenty of additional PR and publicity as certain teams and individuals reacted angrily to the mickey-taking ads.
- The campaign was honoured at the 2005 APG Planning Awards
- With so many Premiership supporters worldwide, the UK-only campaign soon achieved international notoriety, winning a MAX Global Award in Chicago in 2005.
Co op Insurance. Love This Place
Challenge:
Co-op Insurance came to Delineo with a simple brief for a social media campaign that would promote their home insurance product. The campaign needed to breathe a new lease of life into their social media channels, not only reflecting the Co-op community ethos, but also sparking an uplift in engagement.
Approach:
The concept around #LoveThisPlace was centred on rediscovering our love for our home towns. Delineo adopted a social media strategy for the campaign, requiring a two-phased execution. The initial stage involved creating a series of videos which showcased residents from all over the UK, each explaining why they love where they live. The emotive video content was then seeded on Co-op’s social channels, driving engagement.
The second stage involved creating an interactive hub where users could upload photos of their own homes, adding to a dynamic mosaic map of the UK.
Outcome:
#LoveThisPlace proved an instant success. The campaign won Digital Marketing Campaign of the Year at the 2017 PR and Marketing Awards for Insurance, and in just a few short weeks the campaign managed to achieve:
- 898,569 total video views
- 830 comments
- 5,289 likes and reactions
- An impressive 568 photo uploads to our interactive mosaic – and even more on Facebook.