Best Consumer: Why Pay Interest?
Client: Klarna
Agency: Puzzle London
Award: Best Consumer, 2021: Gold
Brief
Klarna makes the shopping experience as simple, safe, and smooth as possible.
Being in the financial services sector naturally brings detractors and confusion about products, services and fees. It’s also not traditionally the most interesting sector. But being a fintech disruptor brand, Klarna actually is interesting. Very interesting.
Working closely with the Klarna team, we were briefed to devise and launch a bold, multi-channel campaign that would:
Stand Klarna apart from traditional banking. We do things differently with our products and for our customers – so we do things differently with our marketing
Increase awareness; this was tri-fold. Awareness overall, awareness with key audiences and awareness ahead of competitors
Counteract myths, dispel confusion and silence critics. Klarna’s pay later products are interest and fee free and allow you to snooze payments, providing a safer way to shop
Showcase the benefits of Klarna products vs other financial services products such as credit cards. We’re always on the side of shoppers – and we want them to know it.
Of course there was a long lead time to get things going… Only joking – the campaign was to launch immediately.
Most campaigns want to grab your interest. This campaign decidedly did not want your interest…
Solution
Keeping brand synergy strong and staying true to our objectives were absolutely key to the success of this campaign.
Riffing on one of Klarna’s pay later product benefits – no interest – Klarna decided to do the opposite of most marketing campaigns, and tell people we didn’t want their interest. We knew this would help the message hit home.
We worked with our partners in the Klarna marketing team and partner agencies to quickly turnaround creative across multiple paid and owned properties. Campaign bursts in May & July 2020 saw Klarna taxis driving around London, print ads, OOH sites and organic and paid social content all getting tonnes of interest (unlike Klarna itself during that time).
Creative taglines like ‘no thanks, old banks’, ‘why pay the old way?’ and ‘this ad doesn’t want your interest’ coupled with Klarna’s quirky branding helped deliver the message in a punchy, instantly accessible way.
Additional hero elements included:
Digi OOH at London Piccadilly Lights – designed, delivered and live in a just few days
Wraps and ads in publications including the Evening Standard, The Telegraph, Grazia and TimeOut
Using consumer input in creative elements, to show the hype wasn’t just by and for ourselves. For example, featuring tweets from people with positive experiences using Klarna in tube ads
Using location specific cultural references for OOH featuring ‘Buy now, pay later customers in the UK saved £76 million in interest charges last year’ messaging. This included ‘that’s enough to buy Liverpool a new centre back pairing’ or ‘that’d buy 19,587,628 pints of cider’ (examples featured in Liverpool and Bristol)
Jumping on trending memes with Klarna specific messaging to hit culturally relevant notes and help our message travel organically on social. For example, the huge success of the England team in the Euros gave the chance to drop classics like ‘Extra time. No Penalties’ (in reference to Klarna’s snooze payment function) during gameplay. We also used the Southgate / Kane hugging meme format at the height of its popularity with Kane tagged as ‘Klarna’ and Southgate tagged as ‘Shoppers who don’t want to pay interest’, delivering product benefits in an engaging way.
Partner agencies also ran activity targeting policy and regulation decision-makers during the campaign periods, to encourage action around bringing pay later regulation up-to-date.