The DeadHappy Approach: September Protection Forum Part 1

This is the first post in our series brining you the fantastic conversations from our September Protection Forum. In this session we heard from Phil Zeidler of DeadHappy about reaching a wider audience, making strong marketing choices, and inspiring change in the insurance indsutry. 

Phil Zeidler:

When we came to understand what we felt the thesis of the product was, we identified that there were two challenges. One, which is the language that people have used around protection products and life insurance and so forth, and how accessible that was for the customer base. And two was how we appealed to them from a marketing perspective, because when you go out and start talking to life insurance to a group of ultimately millennials, 25 to 40 year olds, who are the people who tend to be getting married, buying the first house, having children– that tends to be the first time of their life they’re looking to buy life insurance. Having a conversation about life insurance is rarely high on their list. And so the challenges that we put forward were: we need to help them define the need, why do they need it? Why do they need such a product? Which is very obvious to us that have been in the protection game for a long time. And also, how do you engage with them?

Because they might intellectually understand it, that they need this cover, but how do you engage with them in a way that actually makes them want to engage with you and take that next step to take out cover? So the defining the need was the simplicity of the solution, which again was Andy’s thinking around not describing life insurance in the form of a financial cover, but it was talking about it in a different framework.

The question that we have at the heart of our business is “what do you want to happen when you die?” And that’s a very different question. It’s not asking “what cover you want?” Because most people have no idea, but it is asking some really clear questions that actually are very personal to each of those individuals. Everyone wants something different and it is direct and it isn’t easy to ask.

And hence we developed this death-wish platform, which inspires them to think about all the sort of traditional stuff, paying off the mortgage, paying off school fees, whatever it might be, but also a whole host of other things. And we actually think that life insurance is a far broader application than perhaps the traditional fairly narrow focus of just the pure financial liabilities.

So the death-wish platform was born. But then we get to, I suppose, what is the most important bit for today, which is the question you’ve asked about the marketing. And it doesn’t really matter how brilliant our product is. We might think it’s brilliant, you might think otherwise, but it’s irrelevant. It doesn’t matter how good our death-wish platform is if we don’t get people to actually pay attention to us, to engage with us. And this is one of the hardest challenges in our space because it’s life insurance.

So we were really clear that we absolutely had to step into this space, by doing something the industry tends to avoid, which is talking really clearly– first about using the ‘D word’ openly, even in our name ‘DeadHappy,’ it’s an oxymoron, obviously. And actually developing material that is absolutely going to cut through and that is going to ensure we get a conversation because that’s what it has to do. We have to get people engaged. Now there’s some people who like our approach and some people don’t. And actually, both are valid from our perspective. That’s fine because it’s creating conversation, it’s creating discussions. And then we can start engaging with those people and we engage them very substantially on social media because that’s where so many of the millennials spend so much of their time. And so that’s engagement in itself, and controversy in itself is one thing.

But of course, what we need to try and do is make it positive engagement wherever we can, and clearly any business we would prefer. We don’t want everyone to love us because that’s not possible, but we do want people to understand what we’re trying to do and enjoy engagements, enjoy the experience. So which sounds like a far off distant challenge, enjoying the experience of engaging with the life insurance company. But clearly the route that we felt was most important, and it’s a really valuable tool whenever you’re dealing with a difficult topic such as death, is to use humour. And you don’t need me to tell you there is a huge amount of humour throughout the world that is based around death. Whether you go way back to your various Monty Python sketches, its all the way through.

And if you think about the audience that we’re looking to talk to, the millennials, those people don’t feel close to death. And for the very vast majority, fortunately, they’re not. So they don’t feel threatened by death. So having a tone of voice and a conversation and a marketing theme that actually makes people smile is a very powerful tool for us.

And we created, as you may or may not be aware, if you aren’t and should so choose then you can go onto YouTube. You’ll see some of our adverts with these two characters Mick and Tel who play off against each other: one who’s sort of the cynic, the one who thinks life insurance is a waste of time, a waste of money, and all the rest of it. And of course, the other one who’s sitting on a shoulder just pointing out in a hopefully relatively nice way, certainly not in a preaching way, one or two of the reasons why it might not be a bad idea.

And then you have some comic scenarios that occur that help people smile. And I can’t tell you, this is where I can’t tell you, some of the statistics around this. But there is certainly evidence that if you have campaigns that help get people to smile and laugh, they’re far more memorable. And if it’s more memorable, then they’re more likely to action upon it. If they’re likely to action upon it, clearly, that is help from our perspective.

So our whole tone of voice and the whole campaign is to try and say, “you know what, we are just a bunch of normal people like anyone else out there who, we don’t think that life insurance should be the centre of your universe.” And one thing I should clear up is we definitely don’t want to make life insurance fun. We can’t do that. It’s not about being fun at all. But what we do want to do is make the whole process of engaging with us as a business actually enjoyable and having a smile raised to your face. And those are things that we focus on when we’re developing our campaigns and so forth.

We are thinking about how do you actually ensure you get a really serious message across? Because it is a serious message and we take it very seriously. But we use the wrapper of humour, and the tone of voice that’s straightforward when talking about it to ensure we get that engagement.

I don’t know whether you’ve seen the very latest campaign which just kicked off. And its definitely our edgiest yet– it’s a really simple strat line and it says, “please die responsibly.” And we love it, because you can’t argue against it, that’s for sure. And actually, there’s a quite an amusing advert now that just started going  where we’ve got our main characters watching on television, one guy saying, “How dare they possibly tell me to die responsibly” then switches over channels that ends up on a episode of ‘Love Island’. And I won’t say anymore, but it makes people laugh. So it’s a mixture of a really serious message, but a bit of humour.

When people go to the DeadHappy site they can either make a “death wish” or just take out life insurance. Are you finding most people taking the “death wish” route? What are the more common death wishes you’re finding?

Phil Zeidler:

It’s a fairly even split, actually, there’s a good chunk of people who clearly feel they just know what they want to happen and the cash pay-out, although it’s quite interesting because they’ve still got the ability to write in on that cash death wish what you want to happen and then quite often they will do that. But it is a reasonably even split.

For the ones that go down the death wish route, paying off the mortgage is always going to be I guess the largest one, and that certainly is the case. But there really is an extraordinary array, and that was one of the things that we hadn’t expected. I can’t pretend that we guessed exactly what would happen, but some of the death wishes that people create are incredibly moving and incredibly touching. When I think about some of them… because you’re seeing inside someone’s deepest thoughts about what they want to happen for their wife or their children and they’re doing some amazing things. And it’s those things that… we’ve got screen in the office that comes up with all the death wishes being created all the time. And you are seeing it almost inside someone’s deepest inner thoughts.

So it’s a very privileged position to be in. And they’re just extraordinary. And, sure, a lot of people have seen the ones that talked about sending your ashes into space so that the grandchildren can really look up in the sky and imagine that you really are there looking down. Or bronze statues of yourself so you’re never forgotten or sending bouquets of flowers to people on the anniversary of death. Or actually one of the ones we love is someone created this one about making sure they had football boots for their son every season. And I can’t tell you how many, I don’t know how many different ones but they are all so personal. They’re all so individual, but they are certainly very powerful.

But I guess to answer your question, Adam, the majority are the ones that you would expect, the financially necessary ones. But it’s those added things, you know, sending your mates off on a trip to Vegas or whatever it might be that I think is where we see, I suppose, the most emotional engagement, which is not a phrase you would normally anticipate using when dealing with life insurance.

Lee Thomas:

I love your stuff, I like how to the point it is, but I was just curious whether you’ve had any sort of negative feedback come back or you’ve had any messages where you felt you didn’t quite get it right or you crossed the line and it had a negative impact either from within the industry or just from some members of the public.

Phil Zeidler:

Yes, absolutely we have, no question. And nowhere near as much as we anticipated, actually. We’ve had one complaint to the ASA, which is quite interesting, which is one complaint out of 400,000 people who saw an advert. They interpreted our advert as somehow glorifying suicide, and it wasn’t intended to be that, it was unfortunate, it was a Facebook advert.

We had a few complaints into the ASA that weren’t upheld. That one was upheld. So we’ve had a few that have been upheld because we get that some people, if they’ve just been bereaved or whatever, they aren’t going to see the funny side of life cover or death. And that is going to be uncomfortable.

But I guess we feel that those are things that where you’re going to have to break some eggs to make the omelette. And the only way that you’re going to get this engagement is to get some sort of cut through because the world doesn’t need another banal sort of vanilla insurance brand, peddling a little bit of fear and a family unit. It’s not going to actually achieve the aim, which is to get as many people protected as possible.

Alan Knowles:

Obviously, Phil, we’ve spoken before. And obviously, I’m aware of DeadHappy and everything based on conversation before. I think for me, seeing what other advisers say and its interesting hearing people’s comments on here as well, it is in some ways with advisers, I think it’s Marmite. I think some people absolutely love it. And then some people obviously really just can’t stand it. But that comes down to the language that’s used and whether people think they should be using humour or not around the topic of death.

But I think ultimately, as we said before, you’re marketing here to people who generally don’t get marketed to by advisers. So, you offer life insurance for £1 a month, I think. You don’t catch many advisers writing life insurance policies for £1 a month, and ditto for an 18-year-old as well. Quite often insurable interest and looking at reasons why we can recommend protection, there’s not a great deal we can do for an 18-year-old and also to engage them. So I think that side of it is absolutely fantastic.

I think the question for me, and you probably know where I’m going with this, is some of the adverts in the past, and these are the ones that have heard most of the grumblings from the adviser market are the ones where they allude to life insurance and an emoji of a nice big pile of stinking poo, or the pigeon, etc. So I wondered, how that has gone from now, is that is that something that sort of you’ve gone well, “yeah, we tried that. We didn’t like the approach or is that something that you’re still looking to do going forward?”

Phil Zeidler:

Firstly, Alan, I’ll echo what you just said and I think this is a really important point. This is a massive market, this is a massive problem. We’re not trying to be brokers– our customers, there will be some overlap with brokers, but there won’t be a huge overlap. We’re trying to access a large group of people who would never even think of going to an adviser, it would just not even cross their mind.

But to your point, obviously I had the conversation with you guys and heard the very reasonable challenge, which is actually, how can you as a business say that we’re trying to solve the same problem when you’re saying, like, “traditional life insurance is shit?” Excuse me, that’s exactly what it said. And we use language because that’s actually how everyone talks. Let’s not pretend they don’t, because they do.

And we’ve taken on board that feedback, and you won’t see that now because actually, we don’t need to do that and hence why you’ve seen a new campaign to “please die responsibly.” It’s not looking down that route. We do happen to believe that there are lots of good things, and we would love you to go and talk to the insurers. And there are loads of things that actually traditional products could do, just simple things to make them a lot better. And we would like to be at the forefront of helping improve those things because they’re right for the customer.

So, I do think that there are some things that we should do, but we absolutely accept and hopefully have demonstrated that we’ve learnt from some of that feedback that we’ve got. We are on the same side and that we don’t need to be offensive or abusive around the category as such.