Benenden Health Proposition Development

The Challenge

Benenden Health offer a unique low price healthcare service. All 800,000 of their members pay the same, just £10.25 a month enabling them to request a range of medical services on a discretionary basis (what does that mean I hear you ask!) if the NHS is not able to support them in a timely manner.

Despite the big gap in the healthcare market between relying on NHS services vs. paying hundreds of pounds a month for private medical insurance – Benenden were failing to increase membership. Research indicated a key reason for this was confusion around what Benenden did and didn’t offer. Our challenge was to establish a new clear and compelling customer proposition to increase consumer understanding and take up of the their healthcare membership.

The Moreish Approach

The insight and immersion stage, the cornerstone of any worthwhile brand proposition process, included:

• Conducting 27 interviews with Benenden staff from every area of the business
• A thorough review of:
  • Customer and prospect research and analysis conducted
  • The healthcare market and competitor product offerings
  • Marketing communications from Benenden and competitors.

Our lead insights from this process were:

• General confusion around what Benenden is and offer with so many aspects to cover
• The primary reason people join is to access diagnosis and treatment services
• The low price is the most motivating factor for purchasing (but this also leads to distrust that there must be a catch)
• Rather than leading on the benefits marketing communications were focusing too much on how they offered their service and their ‘discretionary healthcare business model’ (which effectively means that all membership premiums are paid into a shared pot to be used by members for specific services)
• Benenden had a number of significant unique selling points vs. the competition:
  • An incredibly low price vs. breadth of offering (by complimenting rather than duplicating NHS services)
  • Simple to take out – one price for all, no medicals needed with no pre-existing conditions excluded on joining

The redefining outputs of our process:

• An authentic business purpose that everyone in the business could get behind: ‘Changing how people think about private healthcare our vision is to improve the nation’s health, making life better for all our members and the wider society by taking the strain off the NHS.’
• Renaming Benenden to Benenden Health to increase immediate understanding of what’s on offer with relatively awareness of the brand
• A clear single minded proposition to connect with audiences concerned about NHS healthcare but can’t afford PMI

A very clear and simple brand proposition of how we deliver this: 

Once we had our new proposition, we needed to bring it to life, visually and verbally with a new brand identity. We then wanted to launch both the new proposition and identity with impact, generating awareness and demand, and chose to do this with a national TV ad campaign.

Moreish Results

The new brand proposition re-defined the way Benenden Health communicated its 110 year old offering. With our new identity and TV campaign from May 2018 – Dec 2018 we achieved:

• 16% YoY uplift for opinion of the brand
• 50% YoY increase in brand consideration (showing increased levels of understanding of our proposition)
• 38% YoY uplift in web traffic with a 33.6% increase in conversion rate through the website
• 32% YoY uplift in sales volumes

The new brand also impacted B2B sales performance, generating both leads and sales for corporate memberships.

We’re also really excited to announce that the campaign won 3 FS Forum awards for Advertising, Brand Strategy and the judges special award for Marketing Excellence. It’s also been shortlisted for a DMA award in the Financial Services category.