Client Business Challenges

LV= is one of the UK’s leading insurance and financial services providers with 5.5 million customers and 5,800 employees working across 17 UK offices. In 2013 LV= recorded an operating profit of £105 million, making it the UK’s largest friendly society and a leading financial mutual.

Despite a significant increase in the number of providers and marketing spend, the 50+ life insurance market has been relatively flat since 2011. LV= sought to outperform its competitors by applying a smarter approach to understanding the complexities of how its multi-channel campaigns actually influence the customer purchase journey.

BearingPoint’s Contribution

To achieve the outlined results, BearingPoint:

  • Used its unique media optimisation solution, MediaMX 3.0, which can process an unlimited number of data sets using the HyperCube® grid computing algorithm
  • Worked with multiple external media agencies to source hundreds of data variables across all campaigns, including both internal and external data sources
  • Derived more than 4,000 variables, 100+ unique media rules, and the operational impact analysis of what it would take to implement these rules in a new marketing plan

We selected BearingPoint as our analytics partner because of their strong industry and marketing expertise, and their advanced HyperCube tool which we believe will provide LV= with a unique competitive advantage. Not only do we have a better understanding of the impact of spend across channels on our customers, we now also have an integrated process to plan our spend by working across all our internal teams and media agencies.

Geoff Bates, Head of Marketing Analytics LV= Life

Key success factors

The key factors to the project’s success were:

  • Initiated a transformational journey for media planning and review by moving from traditional single channel model to continuous multi-agency, cross-team collaboration
  • Demonstrated the clear impact of investment in one media channel over others, something that was always suspected by LV= but had never been possible to prove without MediaMX 3.0
  • Built strong understanding and knowledge of existing LV= and agency data, their current limitations and additional data requirements for the future
  • Developed a catalogue of 4,000+ combined and derived data variables that can be carried over into further analysis and easily extended with new data sets

Client Business Outcomes

BearingPoint’s media optimisation tool MediaMX3.0 (powered by HyperCube®) achieved the following results:

  • 100+ scientific rules identified to optimise media spend and implemented 14 key business rules in collaboration with LV=’s media agencies within one month (neither LV=’s or media agencies’ existing toolsets had been able to identify these new, unique rules)
  • Annual sales of 50+ product expected to rise ~11% at the same level of marketing spend. A 2% sales increase already achieved after the first quarter thanks to MediaMX 3.0.
  • Socio-demographic sub-groups identified from direct mailing lists that represent a 90% increase in sales conversion, resulting in 81% of LV=’s current sales at only 43% of their mailing cost
  • Uncovered the optimal split of budget by channel and by time of the year, and identified specific combinations of TV times, press times and genre/publication types that could directly increase product sales
  • Increasing LV='s top line through marketing & media optimisation 1.31 MB Download