Principality Building Society launch a new proposition to a new customer segment with Fresco

Principality Building Society developed a new highly focused proposition using Fresco’s insight on consumer behaviour and needs, aimed at the Rising Metropolitans segment. The targeted campaign produced triple the expected uptake of its innovative First Home Steps app.

Defining and Understanding New Target Customer Segments

Over the last twelve months, Principality’s portfolio and propositions teams have been working together to define and understand new target customer segments and design services and products to meet their needs. With a loyal and long-standing customer base, the team wanted to find a way to engage with younger customers nearer the start of their savings journey.

The Society has a long-standing relationship with CACI, having worked together since 2011. It has always used data to support planning and risk assessment and to measure performance. Over the last two years, Principality has evolved and developed the use of demographic, lifestyle and market data from CACI, to further refine its customer and market insight. Using CACI’s Fresco segmentation was an obvious choice to support the project: it describes individuals in terms of their financial product holdings, attitudes, life stage, affluence and digital behaviour.

Fresco Data helps Principality understand the needs of first time buyers

Principality’s innovative First Home Steps campaign was conceived to support and inform first time buyers, helping them to navigate the various steps, financial decisions, and practical actions needed to get onto the housing ladder. It breaks down a potentially daunting decision into practical steps that can make their dream of home ownership into reality, including budgeting and saving towards a first home.

The App is accompanied by an innovative product that rewards prospective customers with increasing interest rates and a celebratory bonus as they move through the steps from saving through to purchasing their first home.

CACI presented data insight to a multi-functional Principality team, showing how it could help to refine different aspects of the proposition and supporting the communication campaign. The data was used from the start, informing every aspect of proposition development. Principality combined the Fresco insight with its own research into first time buyers, to produce a robust and differentiated evidence base that informed every First Home Steps decision.

The Fresco data helped build a picture of the target group and understand their needs, in context of how they live and work and the challenges they face in saving and planning. First Home Steps addresses the ‘Rising Metropolitan’ segment, aiming to appeal to those looking to the future and saving to buy their first property.

The key benefit and difference we have had from this project is that the CACI data has underpinned everything we have done on this proposition specifically. It has helped us define the customers we want to attract, build a proposition, determining the detailed product features, and it’s helped us to market to those customers in the right way, how they want to receive information. It’s been a real end-to-end process, with data underpinning every step.”

         – Susan David, Propositions Manager, Principality Building Society

First Home Steps App delivers triple the expected results

Promoted and supported in-branch, First Home Steps offers ‘workouts’ to get homebuying hopefuls financially and practically fit to obtain a mortgage and buy their first home. Resources include a borrowing calculator, a budget planner, house prices guide and savings tips.

It’s all brought together in the First Home Steps app, a free pocket guide to the house-buying process. Principality hopes to motivate users to open a First Home Steps savings account, to save towards a mortgage deposit.

“We launched in branch and the campaign exceeded targets, especially for people downloading the app, with triple the numbers expected. From the first phase of the campaign, the insight basis has given us great confidence for the next stage.”

– Susan David, Propositions Manager, Principality Building Society

Read the full case study

To find out more about how Principality leveraged Fresco to develop its new proposition, read the full case study here.