The big blue monster driving super growth

Australian Retirement Trust embraced a bold creative idea to boost its brand engagement and created a long term brand asset in the process.

Australian Retirement Trust (ART) Awaken your super campaign.

Australian Retirement Trust, the country’s second largest superannuation fund, has credited its big blue monster Artie with delivering a 60 per cent increase in new customer applications and increased engagement from existing customers.

ART, which boasts 2.4 million members and was formed through the merger of Sunsuper and QSuper, unleashed Artie earlier this year to bolster the new brand’s identity in the competitive and cluttered category, while also encouraging people to take a more active interest in their superannuation.

The Awaken Your Super campaign, which launched in May, has helped the brand attract 50,000 new membership applications in addition to driving a surge in activity from existing members, with the number of member logins up more than 50 per cent in October, compared to the previous year. The brand has also increased its brand recognition among superannuation brands rising from 11th place, prior to the campaign, to its current status at 7th.

ART chief member experience officer Simonne Burnett told The Growth Agenda, the campaign had a lot of heavy lifting to do, in order to not only generate awareness and interest from new customers in a saturated category but also to engage existing customers in the low interest topic.

“Superannuation is one of the hardest categories for advertising effectiveness because of the nature of the market,” she said. “It’s actually quite hard to get people to notice because of the number of competitors. Even if you do execute something distinctive, how do you ensure they associate it with your brand and not another brand?

“We needed to build our presence and the likability of the brand quite quickly, but we also needed to build the credibility around what we did, our size and our expertise. Our focus was to find the most impressive, inspirational and effective way of cutting through the market and creating the sort of impressions that would set the fund up for success.”

Ms Burnett said the brand leant heavily on marketing science and research to ensure the campaign not only cut-through the noise but communicated the key message around “awakening your superannuation” in line with the insight that the earlier people engaged with their super, the better off they would be in retirement.

“We didn’t want to fall into the same old messages and executions that you see around the category. We wanted to try and cut through with a creative idea that allowed us to appeal to all ages, stages and demographics. A lot of superannuation advertising involves the cliches of retirees walking down the beach and that kind of thing wasn’t going to cut it.”

Enter Artie, the big blue monster that symbolises your superannuation. “We wanted to make superannuation tangible, and Awaken Your Super is a deep consumer insight, which is about people’s attitudes to super as a far away thing that they don’t interact with,” Ms Burnett said. “We wanted to say to people that this is one of the most powerful investments you can have. If you take a closer look at it and you really look after it, its potential for you is going to be even greater. And that’s what he embodies.”

The idea, which was created by M&C Saatchi as part of its pitch to win the advertising business, underwent rounds of research and “performed its socks off”, however the next challenge was to maintain the campaign’s spirit through the approval process.

“We backed a very bold, creative idea,” Ms Burnett said.

“But we never would have got that to market if we didn’t have a very robust quantitative and qualitative research program running alongside it, that is the only way that we convinced ourselves and our stakeholders that this was going to be effective, and not a leap of faith.”

Ms Burnett said the brand was on track to meet, and in some cases exceed, all expectations, which she attributed to a metric driven approach with a bold creative idea. “We’ve got really strong results with spontaneous and prompted awareness, both are materially up. Consideration for our brand, relative to other super funds, is moving in the right direction, and that’s the thing we really wanted because if people are spontaneously aware of us, then that comes with an element of consideration as well. We’ve seen really big growth in new member joins that we can tie back to the campaign itself.

“It comes back to really boldly putting a cohesive idea out there, that has legs over the long term. It’s basically the gift that keeps giving, if you nurture it in the right way. (Artie) is a long-term idea that we hope to have for years to come, and to build meaning and resonance around. And certainly the early evidence we’ve got is it’s doing exactly that.”

Ms Burnett said an unintended outcome from the campaign was the surge in morale and engagement within the business, across a range of internal teams and within the brand’s agency village.

“We’re very metric driven, but this has been an appreciation for a creative idea and tightly backing that idea, and not diluting that as much as possible through the process and keeping to what’s special about that original idea and then amplifying it in all the ways that will drive business growth and brand connection.”