MLC campaign trumpets transparency
MLC has launched a group strategic marketing campaign — its first in more than six years — scheduled to run week in, week out over the next 12 months on the major television networks, supported by radio.
The campaign comprises a 60 second MLC brand commercial, which first went to air late last month, as well as a 30-second product commercial for each of its advice, super, investment and insurance categories.
The first of the product commercials, which will be rotated monthly on the major television networks, was scheduled to go to air last Sunday (October 7).
Marketing general manager Scott Graham said the campaign is intended to “lift our top-of-mind awareness as a brand among consumers to where we think it should be for a brand of our size”.
“We have not been terribly active in marketing the brand strategically to consumers over the past six to eight years, and as a result our brand top-of-mind awareness is not what it could be.
“In the interim, some small and very noisy brands have managed to appear bigger than they really are, and there have been some fairly obvious default brands that picked up the sweepings.”
The campaign theme is built around MLC’s ‘building a nest egg’ logo, which, according to Graham, has been “heavily utilised in our print material to date but rarely on television as a strategic device”.
However, the nest egg theme is abandoned in the case of a 30-second ‘advice’ ad that trumpets the transparency of MLC fees and services across its advice networks.
The ad shows a financial planner in his office actually demonstrating this transparency to a client through the use of a fees and charges graph and a growth chart.
“It makes it very clear that the only interests that are at play at MLC and its dealer group licensees are the interests of our customers,” Graham said
The advice ad also tackles a key campaign research finding that consumers believe players in the financial services category “really don’t have their interests at heart”, he said.
“Rather, there’s a sense that the players’ own interests and those of their intermediaries, such as financial planners and fund managers, come first, and the client second.
“Another key consumer concern is that their money is being managed in a somewhat passive fashion using indexing and hedging, rather than being actively overseen.”
The advice ad and the campaign as a whole have very real “implications and benefits” for MLC financial planners, who, according to Graham, have overwhelmingly registered their support for both in campaign testing.
“We believe the campaign will make the dialogue between the adviser and their clients more straightforward by ensuring the MLC brand is top-of-mind among consumers.
“After all, it’s very difficult for a planner to engage in a discussion with a consumer about a product recommendation if that brand is not known and understood by the consumer.”
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