How a distinctive business model became the basis for a new brand positioning that increased awareness, generated 122% more leads and helped PPS grow revenue ahead of the insurance market.
The business challenge
PPS was a very different kind of insurance business. Unlike a traditional insurer with external shareholders, PPS operates as a mutual. Its members effectively own the business and share in its profits, with those profits accumulating over time for their benefit.
It was a powerful difference. But very few people understood it.
PPS had historically marketed itself relatively quietly, concentrating on professional publications and selected university activity. As a result, awareness was limited and perceptions of the brand were fragmented. For some people PPS stood for professionals; for others, it stood for very little at all.
At the same time, it was competing against much larger insurance brands in a category spending millions a year on advertising. PPS had approximately 0.43% share of voice.
The challenge was to establish a clearer position for PPS, increase awareness and translate that into more members and more revenue.
What the analysis revealed
PPS had two distinctive characteristics that competitors could not easily replicate.
The first was exclusivity. Membership was restricted to qualifying graduate professionals, giving the brand a clearly defined audience and a strong sense of relevance to that group.
The second was mutuality. PPS members shared in the profits generated by the organisation.
Of the two, mutuality offered the stronger strategic opportunity because it created a meaningful commercial difference in a category where many products and benefits appeared similar.
The challenge was that “mutuality” itself was not an especially intuitive or compelling consumer idea. It described how the business worked, but it did not yet explain why that should matter to a prospective member.
That became the strategic task.
The strategic shift: turn the business model into customer value
The opportunity was to move mutuality from a relatively obscure organisational feature to the centre of the PPS proposition.
PPS members were more than policyholders. They participated in the success of the organisation and shared in the value it created.
That gave the brand a fundamentally different story to tell.
The strategic territory was built around the idea of shared success. Mutuality became a way of expressing a different relationship between insurer and member: one in which the value created by the business ultimately flowed back to the people who belonged to it.
The underlying proposition was captured as:
Insurance that grows into investment
This translated a complex business structure into a more understandable customer benefit and gave PPS a position that was both distinctive and defensible.
Building a strategy designed to cut through
Positioning alone would not solve PPS’s awareness challenge.
Historically, the brand had focused on specialist professional publications. That gave it precision, but it also kept the brand relatively invisible compared with the major financial-services players.
The media strategy therefore broadened PPS’s presence into selected mainstream channels, including television, business press and digital media, while maintaining tight audience targeting around graduate professionals aged roughly 30 to 55.
This served two purposes.
- It increased the number of relevant professionals exposed to the brand, while also giving PPS greater credibility by placing it alongside the much larger financial-services brands already competing for their attention.
- The aim was never mass-market reach. It was to create significantly greater visibility among the people PPS was actually eligible to recruit.
Bringing the strategy to life
The creative platform translated the idea of mutuality into a simple human truth:
“The key to success lies in sharing it.”
A television commercial brought the concept to life through the story of two competing bakeries.
One baker was struggling despite changing recipes, discounting products and trying different promotions. His competitor continued to thrive. When he eventually entered the successful bakery and demanded to know who the owner was, everyone raised their hand.
It provided a simple metaphor for the PPS model: the people involved in the organisation also shared in its success.
Print and digital communications reinforced the same idea through examples of successful partnerships and collaborations, while calls to action directed potential members towards PPS for more information and enquiries.
Across each channel, the execution changed but the strategic message remained consistent.
The commercial impact
The strategy generated significant results within six months, despite PPS operating with a fraction of the advertising weight of its competitors.
122% increase in leads
The number of leads generated increased by 122% year on year, substantially expanding the pool of prospective new members.
9.1% revenue growth
PPS revenue grew by 9.1% year on year, compared with growth of around 6% for the wider insurance industry.
The brand was therefore growing roughly a third faster than the market.
266% increase in new risk policies
The net number of new risk policies increased by 266%, driven by a combination of new-member acquisition and existing members taking out additional cover.
The strategy also delivered a 17% positive return on marketing investment, alongside a 2% increase in member retention and a 1.8% reduction in lapsed policies.
The brand impact
The commercial results were accompanied by a significant improvement in understanding of what made PPS different.
Before the new positioning, only 7% of non-members recognised that PPS shared its profits with members. Following the campaign, that figure had increased to 21%.
That threefold increase mattered because mutuality was the strategic foundation of the positioning. The work was therefore building more than name recognition. It was improving understanding of the specific reason PPS existed and why its model was different from conventional insurers.
Advertising recall reached 35%, while research also showed strong association between the creative work and the benefits of sharing.
Was marketing really responsible for the growth?
The original effectiveness analysis also looked at what else might have explained the performance.
There were no significant changes to PPS’s pricing strategy, no major new product developments and no new sales channels introduced during the period. Existing CRM and other marketing initiatives continued as before.
The material changes were the repositioning of the brand, the new communications platform and the broader media strategy.
That makes the growth in leads, policies, revenue and brand understanding particularly strong evidence of the impact of the strategic shift.
Why the strategy worked
The first strength was that it built the brand around something competitors could not easily copy. Mutuality was embedded in the PPS business model, which gave the positioning a level of credibility and defensibility that a conventional advertising claim could not provide.
The second was that it translated a complex organisational idea into something customers could understand. “Shared success” made mutuality relevant by connecting it to a tangible benefit for members.
And finally, the strategy made a small budget work harder. PPS could never dominate the category through media spend, so the combination of a distinctive proposition and carefully selected mainstream channels gave the brand a stronger presence without sacrificing audience focus.
The result was a strategy in which brand differentiation, awareness and commercial growth all reinforced one another.
Capabilities demonstrated
Brand Strategy | Positioning | Value Proposition | Customer Insight | Growth Strategy | Communications Strategy | Integrated Marketing | Marketing Effectiveness
My role
As Director of Strategy, I led the strategic development of the work – identifying mutuality as PPS’s strongest competitive advantage, building the positioning around it and developing the communications and channel strategy required to turn that difference into growth.
This work was completed during my agency career, working in partnership with the PPS team and wider creative, account and media teams.