In April in Australia, health insurers spend millions of dollars giving away up to 10 weeks free to lure new members. As a not-for-profit health insurer, we knew that we would never be able to outspend our competitors’ media buys.

For this reason, we had to rely on a unique and bold strategy to not only stand out, but to attract new customers and retain existing members.

So instead of running a big fancy promotion, our strategic approach was to run intentionally bad one and get the public thinking more deeply about the value their health insurer was offering them.

HCF is Australia’s largest not-for-profit health fund. They were facing a major brand challenge in that they were being outspent by their competitors. Not just by a little, but by triple.

To make matters worse, HCF’s competitors were offering new members up to 10 weeks free— but what people didn’t know, was that these offers are heavily subsidised by existing members’ premiums. As a not-for-profit, the idea of spending members’ money on promotions rather than better health care was in utter conflict with their member-first ethos.

Our brief was to develop and launch a new brand platform – ’We Put Our Money Where Our Members Are’. The platform’s intention was to differentiate HCF from the bigger, health insurers that answer to shareholders first, not their members.

Our objectives were to increase brand awareness in this cluttered market and generate product leads.

In Australia, health insurance is largely optional, and people choose their own insurer and policy. It’s an extremely competitive, billion-dollar industry. To lure new members, it’s commonplace for health insurers to offer up to 10 weeks free as an incentive to get people to switch over.

All of these offers typically run during the same period – around April when health insurance premiums go up. For health insurers, this period is make-or-break. How compelling your offer is determines how good your year will be financially. It’s the health insurance equivalent of Black Friday in terms of significance.

HCF was facing a major business challenge. As an Australian not-for-profit health insurer, they were being outspent on advertising by big Wall Street-backed competitors. Not by double, but by triple.

These competitor health insurers routinely offer up to 10 weeks free to try and lure new members: extravagant giveaways that actually cost their existing members millions of dollars.

With their new brand platform—‘We Put Our Money Where Our Members’, HCF challenged us to attract new members without spending millions on a fancy offer—an action that would completely fly in the face of their member-first values.

Our target audience was Australians, aged 25-54, who already had private health insurance but were considering switching providers.

We didn’t want to attract people who were particularly price sensitive because we’d lose them the next time there was a better welcome offer from a competitor.

This campaign was not born of a traditional strategic process. But rather, through deep collaboration between the HCF team and their creative partners. Initially, two workshops were held to unearth business and category insights.

The first of these revealed HCF wasn’t comfortable spending big on marketing because it’s a member-owned health insurer that would rather put money towards their members’ care. From this, we developed a strategic brand platform – ‘We Put Our Money Where Our Members Are’.

Qualitative consumer research confirmed that the idea of a health insurer using actions and not words to reinforce their brand values highly resonated with our sceptical “what’s in it for me?” audience.

Our second workshop led to a breakthrough revelation that while big health insurance offers appear to represent great value, they’re in fact being paid for by existing members’ money.

The tension in this untold insight inspired our creative idea.

In Australia, health insurance companies give away up to 10 weeks free to lure new members. But those big giveaways cost millions of dollars that could be spent on better health care. 

So instead of running a big fancy promotion, our creative strategy was to run an intentionally unimpressive one. We launched The Not-So-Fancy Offer and saved a fortune for HCF members by giving away random stuff we found lying around our office. Everything from pre-loved pens to paper planes, bubble wrap to rubber-band balls.

We gave away our not-so-fancy sign-up gifts in branches all over Australia. And when those ran out, we gave people PDF gifts they could print at home. The campaign was supported by a suite of films, radio, out-of-home and social — all designed to show people that while HCF doesn’t offer shiny welcome gifts, what we do offer is far superior value for our members.

Turns out our Not-So-Fancy Offer was our most successful campaign ever.

- The number of Aussies we’re top-of-mind for went up 31%.

- Paid Site traffic went up more than 30%.

- Product enquiries increased by 40%.

- According to research, two out of 3 people who saw the campaign felt annoyed that their insurer did expensive offers.

- What’s more, HCF entered Australia’s Top 100 Most Valuable Brands for the very first time (coming in at number #49).

- Despite having a lower share of voice, HCF was the only brand during the campaign period to record an increase in salience. The result was HCF’s highest ever level of brand awareness and highest ever brand salience score.

The effectiveness of this work can purely be attributed to the creative idea itself as, unlike our competitors, the core of our campaign was not a traditional discount.

If anything, market factors during this year’s campaign made it much harder for HCF. Rising interest rates had led Australians to be more price sensitive than they’d been in previous years. Our SOV was half that of our competitors (Medibank 23%, Bupa 24% vs. HCF 11%) and had actually declined YOY (from 13% to 11%).