More information about the project (the long story...)

Background:
Europeiska is one of the largest travel insurance companies in Sweden. Still, they are fairly unknown to most people. Their offer is based on an extensive service organisation, with branches in even the most remote locations in the world.

Challenge:
Today Europeiska insures 1,5 million business travellers in Sweden. However, this target group is particularly hard to communicate with.

Business travel insurances are normally designed to cover all employees in the company. A gap between the ultimate consumer and Europeiska has become a barrier in the communication. 

To establish a communication link with the business traveler Europeiska needs to gather names and telephone numbers of the end-business-users. With this information, they will be able to communicate easily and establish a good relation with the travellers.

Brief from Europeiska:
• Europeiska want business travelers to become aware of that they are insured with Europeiska and create a tool in order to communicate directly with the travelers.
• The solution should be able to gather contact information to at least 10 000 business travelers. 

Strategy:
Early on in the project we identified four separate reasons to why Europeiska did not have a brand recognition proportional to the number of insured travelers. These were also the reason why the communication with the ultimate consumer sometimes was hard to achieve.

• Unclear sender
When private travellers book a flight the normally pay with their credit card like Visa Mastercard. Europeiska supplies these clients with their insurance. But the ultimate consumer does not find out who they are insured with until something goes wrong and they have to contact Europeiska. Most of the times the communication starts with a phone call to the credit card company that refers the client to Europeiska.
In the business travelers case the “HR-department” is aware of the travel insurance with Europeiska but not the actual traveler. Therefore any communication the ultimate consumer might have with Europeiska goes through the HR-Department initially.

• Insurance – A non-interesting product
Travel insurance is commonly perceived as a non-interesting product. This makes it hard for Europeiska to communicate their product advantages or to just have a normal communication with the users. The only time the users want to communicate is when an incident forces them to contact Europeiska. Therefore the basis of the communication is almost always negative. 

• Home insurance – Top of mind
The private traveler usually has a home insurance that allows them to travel securely. When a situation occurs that makes the client willing to expand the insurance the company that provides their home insurance is “top of mind”. 

• Company insurance – With possibility to add on a travel insurance.
Every company has insurance and most of those companies give the client the possibility to add on travel insurance. This makes Europeiska a second choice when choosing travel insurance.

Creative brief (and some solutions I guess…)
First we looked at different ways to communicate with the travelers. We found out that most of them travel with their laptop and smart phone. Hence, an iPhone-app designed to replace the travel security card seemed obvious. Moreover, we envisioned that the app could make travelers’ contact with Eurpeiska easier when a communication was needed. But with almost one hundred new apps released every week, we wondered how we were supposed to market our app and make it known and desirable for the user.

We wanted to highlight Europeiskas knowledge and experience about travelling in a safe way. An insight we discovered early in the process was that there was no such thing as bad luck - only bad preparations. This went hand in hand with the notion that we rarely have fun about our “bad luck” until afterwards. We discovered that many people loved to talk about their misfortunes during travels, on social occasions. We wanted people to be able to talk about unfortunate circumstances during the travel under Europeiskas banner.To make the app desirable and to pedagogically explain the necessity of it, a campaign was formed, reaching both business and leisure travelers. In the campaign Europeiska would identify the most unfortunate person in Sweden. The most unlucky guy would then be sent to cross the most mythical sea in the world - the Bermuda Triangle - on Friday 13th. When the person gets back, safe and sound, the app will be released to the public. The name of the campaign is consequently Bad Luck in Bermuda and will be marketed as the riskiest app release in history.

Since the aim of the campaign is to gather names and addresses of business travelers, a big part of the communication will be done over newsletters to the contact persons at the companies.

The campaign is based on the insights that communication about insurances are considered boring and many of the things happening when on a travel could be avoided with cautious planning. Bad luck and travels is a much appreciated topic of conversation, and turning the communication in that direction will allow Europeiska to talk about insurances without numbing its customer with information they haven’t requested, thus paving the way for a successful app launch.