All images courtesy of RPA and Farmers Insurance.Farmers Insurance realized it needed a change. With low brand awareness in the already crowded insurance category, and a limited budget nearly one tenth of their competitors’, the brand needed to differentiate itself and punch above its weight to be effective.
Farmers partnered with Los Angeles-based agency RPA to launch “We Know From Experience,” a campaign focused on articulating the personality of the brand and its breadth of experience with a “show, don’t tell” approach. The campaign recreated thirty “unbelievable but true” insurance claims Farmers Insurance had successfully handled over the years – from the “Cactus Calamity” (in which a gust of wind toppled a 40-foot cactus onto a customer’s roof) to the “Stag Pool Party” (when a group of deer held an impromptu swim in a customer’s in-ground pool and trashed their backyard).
“We Know from Experience” won a Silver Effie in Insurance and a Bronze Effie in David vs. Goliath at the 2018 North American Effie Awards. (The David vs. Goliath category celebrates emerging brands, often with small marketing budgets, that achieve effectiveness in a generally overcrowded or already-dominated category.)
We asked Jess Watts, Associate Planning Director at RPA, for the inside scoop behind the campaign.
Read the full case study here >
What were your objectives for “We Know From Experience?”
JW: We were working towards three essential objectives going into the Farmers® “We Know from Experience” campaign. The first was overcoming the tough cost of entry: Farmers Insurance® is only one of the 30 insurance ads people see each week. We simply had to grow our awareness. With a lower ad budget than some of our competitors, we needed a campaign that could garner attention far beyond our investment.
That being said, when we did get in front of customers, we wanted to resonate with them—particularly our target customer. We found they were a unique group of people who value doing it right, and are not interested in the pricing and messaging gimmicks that were happening in the larger insurance category. Our second objective was to establish ourselves among this group as the insurance brand that is uniquely smart and measured, qualities this group was looking for.
Our last objective was to ultimately get those same people to consider us and buy—no easy task when the average driver hasn’t switched insurance companies in more than a decade. So, the three objectives were awareness, brand attribute resonance, and consideration.
In one sentence, what was your strategic idea?
JW: Real-world experience is a critical source of knowledge; and when your insurer has experience, they can help you understand your options so you can prepare.
What was your big creative idea?
JW: An insurance organization that has experience with those unbelievable claims will have knowledge to handle other claims that life throws at me.
The team thought that the best way to really highlight the smarts of our brand was to tout the experience and knowledge of Farmers by featuring the unbelievable yet real claims they’ve encountered and covered.
The creative execution included showing a host of these unbelievable, covered claims to demonstrate the breadth of experience and smarts that Farmers brings to insurance.
Check out the online “Hall of Claims” here >
Can you tell us a bit about the selection process for the claims featured in the campaign? Were there any other unusual scenarios that didn’t make it into the campaign?
JW: To find the most interesting claims, we kicked off a national program with our Farmers agents and claims adjustors called “Claim to Fame,” where they could submit unbelievable claims covered by Farmers. From there, the team reviewed the entries for the most interesting—water heaters that shot through the roof, deer who had destructive pool parties.
There are so many interesting claims stories that we can’t possibly highlight them all in Farmers commercials.
Were there any challenges in bringing your idea to life? How did you overcome those challenges?
JW: There was a challenge at first in conveying that even though they sounded unbelievable, these were actual claims that Farmers covered. Fortunately, with repetition, a well-placed date of coverage at the beginning of the claim stories, and Professor Burke reminding customers that we know a thing or two, because we’ve seen a thing or two, we started to hear pretty quickly that people understood these covered claims weren’t fiction.
How did you measure the effectiveness of the campaign?
JW: We track our effectiveness by looking at our metrics in relationship to our objectives. Our brand tracker is instrumental in understanding that the gains we saw in awareness reach levels as high as other industry insurance heavy-hitters. The competitive brand tracker also serves as our source to evaluate our effectiveness in growing the unaided consideration of Farmers Insurance. It also allows us to key into our brand-attribute perceptions, which let us know the campaign was driving gains in Farmers being the category knowledge bank. Communications-efficiency tracking is another piece for us, which measures growth of consideration by dollars spent. This gave us the ability to see we far outpaced the competition in the efficiency of our brand communication.
