A big story, built from the tiniest detail.
The power of emotion in a parity market: how we made energy wonderful, for Mercury.
You get the same electricity, whatever you pay. So why pay attention?
In a pure-parity market, apathy is the enemy. If it’s all the same, there’s no point making any effort to choose one brand or another. You’ll switch for the first decent offer that comes along — fuelling an expensive, churn-driven market.
At FCB we pitched and won the Mercury business on a promise of delivering dynamic, data-driven creativity that would transform people’s feelings about the brand.
We did all that, and more — proving the value in a brand relaunch, and beating every single objective (including raising the share price) in under a year.
My role began as Digital Creative Director and grew to encompass strategy, innovation and execution.
From tiny details to big films: it all adds up.
For 18 months, we collaborated intensely with Mercury’s amazing data and customer teams, hypothesising, workshopping, prototyping, testing, and learning against every part of the customer experience. Paid, owned, earned, persona, product, pricing, offer, timing, tone, cadence, creativity, channel mix, spend… everything. 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.
Over the next two years we created a brand-new platform based on electric transport, to demonstrate to New Zealanders how delightful freedom might feel.
My role grew from obsessing over the CX creative and strategy, to helping drive the brand’s look, feel, and storytelling. In a typical day I’d go from writing a headline for a piece of OOH, to working up a testing regime for a regional Facebook retention play, to working with our magical brand creatives to get real feels onto all kinds of screens.
Accessible, wonderful e.bikes made a great vehicle for elevating the brand…
…a journey we continued, by electrifying a ‘57 Fairlane.
UX and UI development of early CX changes to the Mercury website; subsequently (and beautifully!) rebuilt by Catch.
Consulting, art direction and copywriting for the Mercury Go app prototype, including intro video script and storyboard
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