Carrot Insurance
The world’s first D2C insurance proposition
Pioneering a new digital insurance for Korea
As a result of the 2007-2009 recession, young consumers have been cautious when marketed to by insurance firms. In Korea, this is especially prevalent, resulting in fewer young consumers investing in their future.
Hanwa Insurance, together with SKT (Korea’s leading telecommunications provider), responded to this by pioneering a new form of digital insurance in Korea. This offering needed to break away from the legacy insurers and instill a memorable, unique brand that could resonate with Millennials. Interbrand were asked to lead the creation of this new brand.
The next gen of insurance
In our research phase, we uncovered the insight that, as younger generations are more accustomed to short-form media, this needed to translate into the new insurer.
The brand needed to provide just enough communication to foster interest, but not lose the attention of these customers. This meant moving away from traditional insurance/product driven communications, and instead focus our attention on creating relevant and engaging content.
We made it our mission to reflect and convey the changing insurance industry into the new brand and thought about how we could differentiate the brand from its competitors. It needed to be both credible and novel. The end result was Carrot.
In Korean, the word ‘Carrot’ has two meanings: ‘to reward’ – often used in reference to the carrot & stick metaphor, and is similar to the phrase ‘of course’, which has become an idiomatic expression amongst the younger generations.
Making insurance casual
The brand is associated with positivity, with a young, casual and approachable image – and from an experience perspective – differs largely from its competitors. We created short, 3-5 second gifs to communicate the purpose of the product or service and optimized them to be social media friendly.
And rather than use models or license footage to promote the brand, we created a series of bespoke character illustrations so that our clients could focus their resources and time on their most important priority: product innovation.
This led to industry-first insurance products such as ‘Smart On Travel Insurance’ and ‘Smart On Pet Insurance’ – enabling their customers to ‘turn on’ their insurance only when they are engaged in relevant activities.
The official website opened for beta testing in January 2020, and the full-scale launch happened in March 2020.
