What Shipped: Issue 8, 2021

Future Super is a superannuation fund that helps people use the power of their money to build a future worth retiring into. We’re building our product and brand in-house and documenting what we learn in the process.

Here’s what we’ve been up to in the past few weeks:

1. Brand
   A lot’s changed in the last year. We ran research to better understand member attitudes and what’s up.
2. Copywriting
   QUIT SHOUTING! A new pass at brand voice with mixed success.

Brand

A lot’s changed in the last year. We ran research to better understand our members, potential customers.

There is almost nothing I love more than stakeholder interviews and customer interviews. The ‘diagnosis’ phase of doing any strategy should be informed by research, but it’s easy to lean on anecdotal evidence or make assumptions — especially throughout the business where different teams and roles have varying levels of interaction with customers.

We speak to customers regularly, but it’d been a while since we did a full member research piece.

How we did it

We ran:

• A quant survey to members
• Focus groups and interviews with members and potential members
• Founder interviews

Why we did it

• Our member base doubled last year — that’s a lot of fresh faces, and we don’t want to assume our new members are the same as our existing membership base
• The competitive landscape has changed significantly
• We’ve grown and hired a lot of new folks into Future Super — refreshing our research is a good chance to induct everyone in the org into what members care about, what they love about us and where we can improve

What worked

• Using simple threads in Slack to gather hot takes from FS staff that sat in on interviews — made my job compiling notes from interviews much easier
• Creative formats for focus groups and interviews: one of my favourites was inviting a current member to talk to a friend or family member about Future Super and let us listen in
• Coordinating the research to happen at the same time — using the qual to cross check against the quant, lining up founder interviews — it made it easy to see high level patterns vs dipping in and out of the weeds
• Setting clear objectives for the research
• Filming some of the focus groups — it was helpful to play back and share with staff who wanted to hear what members care about
• Partnering with the strategy team to run the survey and do data analysis

What I’d do differently next time

• More friendly times for FS staff to join — I was trying to be too accommodating for members, but missed out on setting interview times that more staff could be joining in on
• Better filming of interviews — doing interviews remotely and facilitating myself meant I had a little too much on my plate and forgot to film a few interviews that I wanted to listen back to
• I think I’d run the quant research first, then follow up with qual to dig further into any areas we wanted to probe

Overall — I can already see how this research is informing our work — it’s so helpful to have real data that supports your strategy OR more importantly, tells you that you need to rethink something. TLDR: talk to your members, don’t rely on ‘stories’ or feelings. Do it often, and socialise the research.

— Amanda

Copywriting

QUIT SHOUTING! A new pass at brand voice with mixed success.

Over the last month, I’ve been working with a freelance copywriter from Language Design on how our brand voice can make Future Super a more inescapable proposition for people considering us. What I mean by this is that we want it to be really hard to say that joining Future Super isn’t a great idea after reading what we have to say. Nick and I spent some time identifying the problems with our identity system last month and how we wanted to address them. So I took that info into an exploration of brand voice aimed at our home page.

So we went all the way back to the proposition — Super is power. Use it — and thought about what kind of voice would help it land. We started with a few truths.

1. Super only makes sense if the future is worth occupying.
2. Future Super is a rational response to a problem that feels too big to solve.
3. Our audience won’t sit with hard feelings.

Rather than opening with hard conversations about climate change that would make people tune out, we wondered what it would be like to play a straight bat. To show people in clever ways that Future Super was a rational response to a passionate belief that we need to do something about climate change. Less shouting, more clever lines of thought.

And so we landed on a brand voice called the passionate rationalist.

What I liked about this exploration is that it didn’t feel like we were rehashing old ground. It felt like something that might be sustainable for the business in the long term. The reality is that even though 75% of people in Australia consider climate change to be a real threat, that opinion sits on a bell curve. Only a small percentage of people consider themselves activists, not everyone who cares is driven to take immediate action, and some people flat out don’t think they can make a difference. So rather than in-your-face activist type messaging, we tried this new approach. Here’s some of the copy we wrote:

The response

The team didn’t love it. They didn’t hate it either. But the issue I found was that everyone had a different opinion on what was right or wrong. Some felt it was too safe — that we’d lost some of the passion in pursuit of rationalism. I think the more reserved tone here is a function of all this copy being written for our website’s home page. It’s not exactly the most controversial of touchpoints. Some felt it resolved some of the issues we were trying to fix, although it lacked specificity. Thankfully that’s an easy fix. Bottom line, even though some of the copy got pretty good reactions — it needs more work.

I’d love for everything I write to be greeted with unfettered enthusiasm all the time. But that’s not the job.

— Jake