2016 Silver Best customer acquisition campaign

Agency AMV BBDO

Client Nutmeg

Campaign summary

Investment troubles? Just nutmeg it.

Campaign overview

In the spring of 2016 Nutmeg was a relatively new start-up in the investment market, having just celebrated its third birthday.

Customer growth had been good but steady, relying largely on word of mouth.

The brief was to achieve a dramatic increase in customer numbers of 50% over a four month period.

Strategy

Nutmeg was established in 2012 as the antidote to the exclusive and nontransparent investment world.

Three years on growth was steady but brand awareness was low at 11%, even in Nutmeg’s target market. The time was right for Nutmeg to launch their first major advertising campaign.

Throughout November 2015, Nutmeg conducted 1350 online interviews with current and prospective customers. This identified three key barriers to investing: Time, researching was difficult because of financial jargon and complexity; Money, people thought it was expensive to start and only for the wealthy; Risk, stocks and shares were perceived as unstable.

Nutmeg wanted to overcome these concerns. In addition, it was important to covey why Nutmeg differed from other wealth managers and the Nutmeg brand promise - that Nutmeg makes it easy for everyone to access the benefits of quality investing.

Creativity

Nutmeg created two animated bears Nut and Meg. Nut represented the old world of investing, articulating the barriers identified that put consumers off. He was always having trouble, stung by complex fee structures, sleep deprived from trying to selfmanage his investments, or stressed about rebalancing his portfolio to minimise risk.

Meg was the Nutmeg customer - calm, approachable and in control of her investments. The only words she ever said were ‘Just Nutmeg it’, with this repetition building brand attribution.

Executions were structured to overcome the barriers to investing one by one while positioning Nutmeg as an approachable, non-elitist, new way to invest. Londonlocalised TV ran in conjunction with commuter out of home executions and press strips on the front pages of the Evening Standard and the City AM in the run up to the ISA deadline - identified as the most crucial period of financial decision making, so all activity counted down to this crucial deadline.

Results

Despite a tough year for ISAs, the campaign beat growth target by +50%.

It was impossible to miss the distinctive Nutmeg bears. They even caught public imagination, featuring in numerous tweets (unusual for investment ads).

Brand awareness in London rose from 12% to 36%, and search traffic increased 9.9% year-on-year in the context of general ISA search traffic being down 3%.

New customer uplift increased 54% in comparison to TYE 2015.

Despite being new and small, between March and year-end, Nutmeg won 15% of all UK net ISA flows, up from 3.13% in 2015, and also won 756% more prospects than during the same period the preceding year.

Team

Stephen Stretton (Creative Director) • Kristian Foy (Creative) • Martin Lythgoe (Creative) • Laura Balfour (Account Manager)

Contributors

Not to Scale (Production Company) PHD (Media Agency)