SPP
SMALL CHOICES MAKE A BIG DIFFERENCE
SITUATION
SPP came to us in 2013 with an ambition to be the best at pension savings and a vision of being recommended by their customers. They were relatively well known, but were not clearly differentiated from their competitors or particularly good at explaining you should choose SPP?
In addition, there was the age-old problem of getting people to feel more involved about their retirement. For most people, it is something that happens far off in the future, and nothing you regularly reflect on in your everyday lives.
We soon realized SPP has been working with sustainability for over 20 years and is one of the world's most sustainable companies. They are best at sustainable savings for pensions. As a customer, you can feel secure that your pension savings are only invested in a way that positively impacts the environment and for the people in it. But SPP had never communicated this outside of a few PR activities.
THE BRUTALLY SIMPLE SOLUTION
We created a communication strategy around it not being enough to just save for your pension – you also need to save for a sustainable future to retire in. This gave SPP a relevant and interesting reason to talk to people.
Together with SPP’s employees, we worked extensively to anchor the concept internally. The entire organization was involved, as pride grew around SPP taking the position as the sustainable pension company.
In the summer of 2014, the concept “Small choices make a big difference” was launched, with a first campaign linking SPP to sustainable savings and explaining why you should choose SPP in simple, relevant ways. The following year’s brief was to communicate the concept in digital media. From being seen in television and out of home, SPP would now switch entirely to digital – so we needed to find a way to engage audiences and dramatize the link between pension savings and sustainability.
Research showed people have trouble visualizing the future and connecting the choices they make today with the consequences they might experience later on in life. The purpose of the campaign was to overcome this challenge and get people to actively reflect on the kind of world they want retire in. We wanted to demonstrate that just saving for retirement is not enough – if you want to retire in a good world, you need to save sustainably.
The solution was a website called “earth2045.com”, which was built around an interactive film with two fictional scenarios – one sustainable and one unsustainable – that were presented at the same time. The film was set in 2045, when our target group was approaching retirement. A slider, where users could actively flip in real-time between the two scenarios, and directly compare the differences, separated the two versions of our future.
The slider moved seamlessly, and sound and music was changed as you swiped. By pulling the slider, users could see that small choices today actually can make a big difference in the future.
Although the idea was very simple, the execution and production was extremely complex and technically demanding. We didn't just have to create two scenarios that felt authentic, but be seamlessly synced in two different versions, with exactly the same timing.
THE RESULT: A DRAMATIC MEASURABLE CHANGE
The concept "Small choices make a big difference" was very well received. Based on SPP's previous experience, we set two lofty goals: Firstly that SPP would be the top three in the industry in terms of conceivability, and secondly, to increase association to sustainable savings by 20 %.
The targets were not only reached, but also exceeded. SPP was now clearly established as top three in category and associations for sustainable savings had increased by as much as +48%! All this while also reducing SPP’s media investment by approximately 20%.
The Earth2045 campaign was widely shared – even outside Sweden. Dispelling the myth that sustainability was unimportant to people’s pension savings, we created a strong association that not only customers recognized and responded to, but also by SPP’s employees who claimed their work gained clarity and became more fun.
WANT KNOW MORE?
EMAIL: bjarte.eide@mcsaatchi.com
NUMBERS
+48%
ASSOCIATION WITH SUSTAINABLE SAVING
