Cigna, the health insurance service company, has generated strong brand benefits and driven positive behaviour change among consumers through focusing on well care rather than sick care.

Stephen Cassell, Cigna’s vice president/global branding, discussed this subject during a session at Advertising Week New York 2018.

And the Bloomfield, Connecticut-based firm had seen enough imagery of yoga, babies and nuclear families – the kind of visual codes that make every piece of category marketing look like a me-too imitator of the competitive set.

“As a health-services company present in more than 130 countries with 95 million customers, we wanted to change the conversation,” said Cassell. (For more, read WARC’s in-depth report: Cigna flips brand message from ‘sick care’ to ‘well care’.)

“So many different factors – from physical, emotional, financial, social and spiritual wellness, as well as a sense of security – are constantly challenging people. How do you get a handle on that?”

One simple insight, drawn from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention rather than a marketing-research initiative, turned Cigna’s marketing program upside down.

“We realised, as we dug further and further into the topic, that we had an opportunity to save 100,000 lives a year. One hundred thousand people die every year because they don’t get the right preventive care,” said Cassell.

The first steps to a healthier life, he explained, are not complicated: In fact, improving the quality – and length – of your life was no more complicated than “just going to the doctor and understanding where you are in your health journey”.

And, with that grounding premise, Cigna changed the dialogue to encourage people to think about ‘well care’ as opposed to ‘sick care’ – to take care of themselves before something happens.

The subsequent campaigns have included “Say Ahhh”, which nudged people to get a check-up at the doctor, and involved a partnership with “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”, a late-night television show on ABC.

Coming next was “The TV Doctors of America”, an effort that tapped into decades of on-air credibility by bringing together actors – like Noah Wyle and Patrick Dempsey – who have played doctors in popular, medically-themed television shows.

Alongside requesting that people get check-ups, this campaign has addressed topics such as opioids. And Cigna helped extend its good intentions through mobile clinics that have visited over 170 cities since 2016.

The result? Two billion impressions and a lift in brand sentiment, as well as “an 18% increase in adult check-ups” across Cigna’s business, which Cassell said “results in literally millions more people getting preventive care check-ups”.

Sourced from WARC