“Make It Cheaper” finds fun ways to increase B2B employee engagement through the best internal audience campaign

Read about how Rooster Punk helped Make it Cheaper get its employees fired up about its new vision and brand identity 

About

Make It Cheaper was launched in 2007. It aims to take the hassle out of shopping around for better deals on electricity, gas, insurance, merchant services and telecoms. In short, businesses (largely SMEs) come to Make It Cheaper looking for the best prices on their utilities, and the company helps them save money by finding the best available deals on the market.

In under 10 years, Make It Cheaper has grown from a team of five to 200 employees, who are all working to help put a smile on the faces of British businesses. The startup mentality of the company and core belief in helping small businesses has helped it thrive – customers give Make It Cheaper a service ranking (NPS) that rivals John Lewis and beats Apple and Amazon.

Here’s how Make It Cheaper is putting a smile on the face of British businesses:

• Make It Cheaper typically saves customers £1,150* on their bills.
• The company has been featured on the Sunday Times Fast Track list three years in a row (the UK’s top 100 fastest-growing companies).
• It has over 42,000 live customers.

*Figures based on 8,254 contracts arranged in 2016 when compared to prices or renewal quotes of existing suppliers.

Strategy

Rooster Punk’s task was to excite call centre staff and keep them highly motivated as an audience that wants to work somewhere with purpose. The company has a young, fun energy about it, so the campaign aimed to replicate this buzz while getting employees fired up about the impact they have on people’s lives and small businesses in Britain.

Objectives

 

The internal launch had three main objectives:

1. Familiarise Make It Cheaper employees with the new brand.
2. Create excitement around the brand.
3. Make employees feel like they are part of something special.

To do this, Rooster Punk re-imagined its brand story, positioning and visual identity in order to help them assert market leadership on a global scale.

Target audience 

Make It Cheaper employees. 

Project deliverables

Create an understanding of the emotions felt by  moving from savings to something amazing:

• Joan and her butterfly effect – this brought the idea of something amazing to life and helped the employees relate to this character.
• Experiencing random acts of kindness. Make It Cheaper set 13 of its staff on a secret mission to trigger random acts of kindness across the business. By the end of the week there were more than 80 random acts of kindness. They then celebrated by creating a butterfly effect of their own with a free vending machine for the day (see video below).
• Plan and execute an offsite team day to land the message.

Create an environment that nurtures the new proposition and DNA

• MIC DNA Blueprint, MIC DNA posters, email templates, floor stickers.
• Create team and room names.
• Created more than 100 stories to explain how it makes its customers smile.

Media, channels or techniques used

The internal launch centred around an afternoon where all MIC employees travelled offsite, to take part in a series of chain reaction-themed discussions and games. The core idea is that it’s not about how much you save, but what you do with it. There was a video for employees to watch showcasing the butterfly effect. In order to make employees feel like they are part of this journey, various talks and games demonstrated this message. While the afternoon was the focal point of the brand, awareness around it was built up with accompanying desk drops, posters and emails. During the away day, employees wrote down notes about the campaign – when they arrived back in the office the following week, all of their messages were placed on a ‘tree of smiles’ in the reception area. Through this the message of the day was reinforced in a positive manner. 

Timescales

Planning

: January – Early February

Messaging

: February

Brand book

: February

Website

: March

Launch assets

: March-April
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Launch event

: 8 April