Mercury: the power of great CX
“An insightful strategy that led to bold, single-minded creative that humanised electricity. The influence from churn reduction to share price stacked up in what is undoubtedly one of the hardest categories to generate consumer engagement – effectiveness made wonderful.”
I’m a huge believer in the transformational power of emotion when applied to logical systems. And if there’s one project in my career that truly demonstrates this power (and my love for CX), it’s the work we did for Mercury while I was at FCB.
We won Mercury’s advertising account with a pitch that promised to focus on retention, through outrageously accurate targeting, largely based on personas. For the next 18 months, I worked as Digital Creative Director leading the data, digital, direct marketing and media teams at FCB to put Mercury’s customer data through the mill, in search of customer behaviours that would give us non-linear improvements in acquisition and retention in a highly apathetic market.
Collaborating intensely with Mercury’s amazing data and customer teams, we hypothesised, workshopped, prototyped, tested, and learned against every part of the customer experience. Paid, owned, earned; persona, product, pricing, offer; timing, tone, cadence, creative, channel… yep, everything.
Not everyone was thrilled with the intensity. Traditional ad creatives couldn’t see the fun in testing headlines and subjects, or sending emails without images; but they shone when it came to taking a new angle on the big story. We gave the tech team at Mercury a ton of headaches, by insisting on flexibility from their SAP stack. Meantime, a senior person at Mercury openly scoffed when we suggested people would respond to something other than cash as a motivational tool. He still owes me $100.
The work was worth it, though. We discovered (with robust proof) a truly striking thing: most people don’t necessarily want the cheapest electricity. They want a sense of control; and they want some form of delight.
Years 3 and 4 we reinvested everything we’d learned into rebranding the company – taking Energy Made Wonderful as a story, and applying it to the customer experience through the integrated marketing systems we’d built over the previous two years: web ads, Social content, bill messaging, call centre scripts, a big brand TVC, partner POS, and some outstanding dev and design work from the web team at Catch.
Everything took off: customer retention, staff engagement, brand scores, company performance, acquisition, revenue… you name an objective, we exceeded them all, in under a year. And kept accelerating.
Layer upon layer of inspiration, information, activation, and rewards – packed with wonderful experiences.
We delivered a whole new angle on electricity marketing – one of delight – and people think it’s wonderful. Mercury moved from second-highest to outright-lowest in churn amongst the Big Five retailers, and finished 2018 as #1 for net customer gain in arguably the world’s most competitive electricity market. Add to that: record revenue, record profit, record customer satisfaction, and more.
My role in this work – as part of a wonderful team – began as Digital and Direct CD, and grew to Strategist and Brand Champion. I also wrote the papers that won the awards. But you’ll notice I use the word “we” liberally in telling this story. You simply can’t deliver this kind of work without some extraordinary collaboration.
2017 EFFIE AWARDS
GOLD - Consumer Services | GOLD - Most Effective Integrated Campaign | GOLD - Best Strategic Thinking | GRAND EFFIE – Most Effective Campaign
2017 NZ MARKETING AWARDS
SECTOR AWARD – Consumer Products & Services | EXCELLENCE AWARD – Best Marketing Communications Strategy | SUPREME AWARD – Energy Made Wonderful
