Welcome, Pluto (nee Mia)!
Since we started Mia a couple of years ago, we’ve learnt a lot. Our first product was positioned as a complimentary service to your existing insurance policies. Mia would act as a friendly and wise assistant to “manage” your existing policies. Although the initial adoption was encouraging, engagement was low and people weren’t coming back. After talking to customers, we uncovered a big challenge we had to tackle: there was no compelling value-exchange. We’d ask our customers to do a lot (find their insurance policy and send it to us) and the value we delivered (“managing” your policy through Messenger) wasn’t high enough to warrant this effort.
What’s more, with this proposition we weren’t able to have an influence over the worst things about insurance. Stuff like everything written in such a complicated way, it’s difficult to know what you’re buying or what you’re covered for. Or the problem that most people think that insurers will do anything in their power to not pay out on claims.
We decided that if we wanted to have a real impact and make the fundamentals of insurance better, we needed to sell insurance. So, that’s what our focus shifted to. We set ourselves the challenge of creating a proposition that overcame all of the terrible things about buying insurance, starting with travel.
And here’s what we landed on: Travel insurance for people who don’t like insurance. Easy to understand. Hassle-free claims. On your side.
To deliver on this, we need to do things differently. You only have to look to the urban dictionary to see the negative perceptions towards insurance. To overcome this, we want to build a brand and product that’s bold, progressive, smart, fun, and even a bit of a renegade.
With this new brief in mind, we felt ourselves questioning whether our existing brand, Mia, fitted this new brief. After much deliberation, the conclusion was no.
The original Mia brand was built to reflect the personality traits of being: intelligent, trustworthy, authoritative and wise. Although these still hold true, we’re pushing beyond that.
There are two main reasons why we felt the existing brand no longer supported our proposition and positioning:
Firstly, the blue colour palette is not differentiated within the market: look across the insurance and finance industry and the majority of brands rely on dark blues within their colour palette. We didn’t feel comfortable positioning ourselves as a brand that does things differently, whilst looking the same as the majority.
Secondly, naming a chatbot/digital assistant after a female has become a cliche and a negative stereotype: when we created Mia, chatbots were less mainstream. Brands were attempting to mimic a human personality for their chatbot to build a brand relationship. Since then, consumers have become accustomed to talking to brands, not people. It’s even a bit confusing if you position a chatbot with a human identity, yet it’s not a human. Ultimately, naming a chatbot after a female doesn’t feel very progressive.
This led us to a new name: Pluto. Why? Because we’re creating travel insurance that’s out of this world. Beyond this, planet Pluto is the epitome of a renegade. The planet Pluto doesn’t fit into the category of a “regular planet”. It sits alone as a “dwarf planet”. The little guy out there doing things differently. That’s us.
We’ve crafted our brand strategy and personality for Pluto, so the next stage is to work on defining a new brand identity. One that fits our personality of being bold, fun, and progressive.
Some people may question the importance or the need to spend time and money on a rebrand when we’re at such an early stage of our journey. But we firmly believe that if we’re to capture an audience who currently don’t engage with insurance, we need to craft a brand that clearly communicates our desire to do things differently.
