Hiscox is a specialist insurer, with a great reputation and long history.

After a difficult pandemic, brand fundamentals were beginning to crumble. Hiscox had to regain salience for its business insurance offering.

But it faced significant headwinds. Giant insurance groups dwarf Hiscox’s share of voice. The company needed to do something different, and needed to cut through.

So Hiscox launched a new brand platform - “Your story, underwritten by Hiscox”, which celebrates Hiscox’s unique expertise by showing the company understands the strange and stressful scenarios that befall SMEs.

Across out of home, radio, social and display, Hiscox launched its new brand platform with ‘the most disastrous campaign ever’. Each execution in the campaign had ‘gone wrong’ in a humorous way that linked to Hiscox’s insurance offering. A radical approach in a category that’s afraid of talking about risk.

The creative idea was to launch the most disastrous campaign ever: a series of ads that highlight all of the business disasters that Hiscox protects against, by showing those same disasters happen in and to the adverts themselves. It was a playful melding of creative and media that took place across OOH, print, radio and more that reminded people that we’re all capable of making minor mistakes with big consequences.

Hiscox is a specialist insurer - where other insurance companies are ‘one size fits all’, Hiscox only insures businesses in sectors where it has deep expertise, with a particular focus on SMEs.

This means Hiscox understands its customers better than any other insurer. But it also means Hiscox can’t shout as loudly as its enormous competitors.

We went ‘all-in’ on Hiscox’s unique expertise. Ignoring the bland and disingenuous customer service messaging of the rest of the category, and instead highlighting the real risks that our customers face. Showing that we understand the human story behind every business disaster.

Crucially, though, the campaign had to avoid fearmongering. By showing disasters happening to our own campaign, we used humour and self-deprecation to puncture the anxiety.

Each part of ‘the most disastrous campaign ever’ worked in a subtly different way. The high impact special build sites were established to catch our audience’s imagination, and were rolled out nationwide on the largest scale ever for a special build campaign in the UK. The traditional OOH campaign featured photography from Chieska Fortune Smith alongside humorously clever headlines. The radio executions added depth to the disasters in a different media format, as did the Metro placement. And all of this core business work was supported by specific sub campaigns that targeted different sectors of business, from IT consultants to Cleaners. This was a UK-only, nationwide campaign which initially released in September 2023.

Early tracking suggests extraordinary shifts in all priority brand metrics, with spontaneous awareness growing by 50%, and sales through PPC increasing 37%.

BRAND -

Unaided awareness as a key metric grew by 17% 

Those who saw the campaign were:  11% more likely to say Hiscox makes it easy to buy business insurance  and 9% more likely to say Hiscox champions small business owners 

BEHAVIOURAL -

Search volume increased by 50% YoY for “Hiscox insurance” and “Hiscox business insurance” keywords.  Business insurance quotes grew 10% vs baseline forecasts 

BUSINESS -

Sales grew by 11% uplift during the campaign.