Now that even the folks at Boston 2024 are onto the public relations crisis surrounding their plan to bring the Olympics here, let’s do some speculating about how they’ll respond.
Fortunately for the Boston 2024 team, its members include specialists in public relations work, such as the marketing firm Hill, Holliday. And fortunately for the rest of us, a preview of the kind of PR blitz we may soon expect in support of Boston 2024 is already available on the Hill, Holliday website. Here they are tooting their horn about a successful marketing campaign they undertook a couple years back for Liberty Mutual Insurance Company (not coincidentally, another member of the Boston 2024 team). I quote from it at some length because I just could not help myself. Smarmy has a hypnotic effect on me sometimes.
Making a Challenger Brand a Leader
Liberty Mutual…needed a resonant idea that would impact awareness and consideration, magnify its media investment, and drive growth – particularly online.
Liberty Mutual was founded on the belief that the employees were responsible for “helping people live safer and more secure lives.” Internal interviews of everyone from the CEO to the call-center reps confirmed a resounding desire to do the right thing rather than the easy thing. This shared value of responsibility became our resonant idea. It also meant we had found our best customers: “The Responsible Ones” who shared the same values and culture as Liberty Mutual itself.
By going beyond the demographical information to connect the consumer to Liberty Mutual via a shared value of responsibility, we struck a chord that has generated familiarity, fame, and favorability.
Kicking off in 2006, the campaign, tagged with “Responsibility, What’s Your Policy?,” launched with TV, print, a new Web site, and digital focused on people “doing the right thing” versus the easy thing.
The campaign struck a chord and the client was surprised and delighted by hundreds of letters and e-mails thanking them for the effort celebrating responsibility. Customers recognized themselves, employees rallied to the idea, and prospects became customers based on their alignment with this shared value. When it became clear that stakeholders wanted to further engage in this idea, we created a platform for them to continue the conversation.
The ResponsibilityProject.com launched in 2008 and became a program where consumers could seek Liberty Mutual out. We directed people to the site and blog where rich, compelling stories and videos about responsibility were brought to life…
Ah, yes, some favorable press involving compelling stories about responsibility and doing the right thing rather than the easy thing. That sounds just like what Boston 2024 is in the market for about now.
Which brings us to the question of what else was going on at Liberty Mutual during the time that Hill Holliday was orchestrating the “Responsibility, What’s Your Policy?” pitch. As it happens, we know a fair amount about that, thanks to former Globe columnist and current Globe editor Brian McGrory. It seems that most of the time the executives at Liberty Mutual were doing the easy thing rather than the right thing. In a series of nine columns written during two months in 2012 (a sampling of these columns: here, here and here), McGrory detailed Liberty Mutual’s lavish corporate ethic: $50 million in compensation for its CEO, a top-nine executive payroll that exceeded that of the Boston Red Sox starters, $200,000 in compensation for each member of the Board of Directors, five private jets for flights to luxury vacation homes, etc., etc., and all this money coming from the hundreds of thousands of Liberty Mutual policy holders. Then, as now, the Liberty Mutual executives were among a group of friends circulating enormous riches. During the administration of Governor Deval Patrick (now Boston 2024’s ambassador to the International Olympic Committee), the state gave a $22.5 million tax break to Liberty Mutual to build its new headquarters in Boston. Liberty Mutual awarded the contract to renovate its CEO’s executive suite (price tag $4.5 million: woven silk wallcoverings from the Netherlands and a personal exercise room) to Suffolk Construction, whose CEO, John Fish, is now the Chairman of Boston 2024. And, back to where we started, the public relations contract with Hill, Holliday, whose CEO is the co-chair of Boston 2024’s public relations and marketing committee.
You get the picture. Boston 2024 is in serious need of a resonant idea right now. Therefore, we’ll soon be hearing of one homespun value or another that will be said to animate our would-be Olympians. If it’s as good as “Responsibility, what’s your policy?” was for Liberty Mutual, maybe the folks at Hill, Holliday will be bragging about it in a few years. Or maybe we’re smarter than that.
(Earlier version cross-posted here.)
judy-meredith says
Hysterical read — I almost swallowed my apple the first time I read this..
Compulsive obsessive swarmy spotting is s a common disorder among political junkies and investigative journalists. Actually it’s not a disorder, it’s natural insight enhanced by clairvoyance and common sense.
Christopher says
Their rates are competitive, though I did leave them recently for something less expensive, and I never had a complaint about their service. Policyholders do get a vote in corporate matters and as such when they called an annual meeting for which an agenda item was to raise the CEO’s pay I did send in my proxy ballot to vote no.
Mark L. Bail says
proxy ballot work out for you?
Judging a company based on its customer service is good enough for customers, but it’s not a good basis for judging corporate citizens.
Christopher says
No, there wasn’t a great uprising, but at least I bothered to return mine since I believe the letter said unreturned ballots would be counted as votes in favor. I actually do think being good for customers is a decent standard, much better than good for traditional shareholders.
TheBestDefense says
It is a company owned by it policy holders, not by management, but management sucks tens of millions out of it every year for the sole benefit of themselves. Does anybody remember when they did a multi-million dollar rehab of the CEO’s office even though the company had already decided to relocate to another building within the year?
Remember Jason Adkins the very hot, uber-smart and uber driven ego who tried to stop demutualization as a management scheme to shortchange the policy-holder/owners of ownership. Finneran had already promised a change in the law and the matter was before the Insurance Committee with Nancy Flavin the Chair. She was a nice woman but utterly clueless on most everything. It does not matter as Finneran rammed it down the throats of the members, most of whom did not bother to study the matter.
These corporatists cannot keep their hands off of OPM (other people’s money).
HR's Kevin says
Maybe their rates are competitive now, but they sure weren’t back when I decided to switch from them to Amica. I also had a bad experience when I had to make a claim after my apartment was robbed. That was more than 10 years ago, so maybe they are better now, but I would never consider using them again.
Christopher says
…which I guess is why every company claims that those who switched to them saved an average of $X. I had only auto and was paying in the $60s per month. I decided to try to find something cheaper, but just about everyone else was also $60s with a couple even $70s. The exception was GEICO which was a real outlier in the $40s so I went with them. I never had an issue filing a claim.
SomervilleTom says
I gag each time I hear the Liberty Mutual line on NPR.
It has never made any sense to me. Is it a pun? Surely. But I just don’t get the point. Then I wonder if perhaps THAT’S the point — to make me wonder if it had a point.
My insurance provider is Commerce. They combine our auto insurance with our home insurance, and we get a MUCH lower premium overall.