TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris 'In it with you' Liberty repositioning places humanity at the heart of financial services

Inevitably, as these changes have filtered across society, it has also placed a huge responsibility on brands to be more empathetic and understanding of the situation their customers find themselves in now more than ever. This is no more true than for financial service providers such as Liberty.

“The new era is about humanity. For Liberty, this means understanding and examining what it is that customers want, how they want to be understood and how the brand should be adding value to their customer’s lives,” says Carl Willoughby, Executive Creative Director at TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris.

“Although our journey to find the right, new and refreshed positioning for Liberty started before Covid-19, our positioning, ‘In it with you’, is more relevant now than it would have been before the pandemic hit because of the emphasis placed on human connections.”

At its base, the positioning is about life and understanding the weird and contradictory things we sometimes do, issues we face, the support we will need in the future and ultimately, about life.

“This approach highlights the organisation’s core business - which is focused on providing for all stages of a customer’s life and about lifelong associations with the company by building a unique, human connection with the people whose financial health Liberty grows,” explains Willoughby.

Essentially, working to achieve the objective meant acknowledging the importance of service through technology, but breaking through this to find the ‘humanness’ behind the data to create a uniquely human-centric campaign that highlights the tendencies and quirks that we all have, making the campaign not only more relatable, but more real.

Conceptualised by TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris and their brand architect partners, Yellowwood, the 30-second repositioning launch TV ad celebrates the weird, but typical, ways that people hide their feelings, provokes a smile about our tendency to tell others that we will ‘be there in five’ even when we know we will take 20 minutes, and celebrates the fact that being human is not simple.

“‘In it with you’, is many things but above all it is about being human. Recognising what makes us human means that financial solutions have to recognise that we are all different and that our differences must be catered for,” explains Willoughby.

Matching these differences to peoples’ everyday behavioural contradictions and using understated humour, the agency has subtly underscored that Liberty is a distinctly different service provider.

“The financial services sector is competitive, and it is often difficult to create excitement and differentiate your brand from that of market rivals. But we feel that we have achieved this through our powerful statement: knowing all the weird and wonderful things that make us human, because human beings being human is what we make financial solutions for,” says Willoughby.

Besides emphasising this statement, the campaign also stresses the solutions that Liberty is providing for people by people who experience the same joys, challenges and disappointments as their customers. It is about committing, taking centre stage, understanding concerns and standing up for customers. It is about reinforcing that Liberty is 'In it with you' by making humanity more visible.

In the process of achieving the shift in the Liberty corporate personality, the TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris team has effectively challenged the belief that all financial advertising is the same and brought a sense of warmth to the category.

Despite lockdown restrictions, the process of developing the initial campaign ad took eight weeks from script sign-off to filming. It was produced by 03:07 Films and directed by Kim Geldenhuys.

The TV spot is currently airing on a number of channels.