A New Ad Campaign for Idaho’s Health Insurance CO-OP

Health insurance is a hard product to like. It’s expensive. It’s complicated. And you usually only think about it when something bad is happening.

By contrast, what’s not to like about a CO-OP? Members get a voice and a vote in how the CO-OP is run. And if it generates a profit, it must be used to benefit those members (rather than shareholders) through lower prices and other means. (Learn more about CO-OP's here.)

So what happens when you mash these two ideas—CO-OP’s and health insurance—together?

A good idea comes to Idaho

This summer, we had the opportunity to find out when we developed a new brand for Mountain Health CO-OP, as well as a marketing campaign to tell its story.

Mountain Health CO-OP is an offshoot of Montana Health CO-OP, which sold its first policies in 2013 and went on to capture a huge chunk of the Montana health insurance market. That success earned them an invitation from the federal government to expand into Idaho in 2014.

Branding, advertising and website development on a tight budget

CO-OPs are, by nature, low-overhead operations. Marketing is kept to only what’s absolutely necessary, so we focused on a few key areas: updating their brand identity, raising awareness, and creating an easy-to-use website. 

We started by taking Mountain Health CO-OP through our brand identity development process, creating a new brand story, values, personality, tagline, and manifesto, while visually simplifying their parent company’s existing brand identity. Through mood boards, we developed a look that captured their brand values and personality with a laid-back, local feel.

Even though health insurance isn’t simple, we wanted our campaign to feel simple. The problem with introducing something new and different is that it’s new and different. The concepts for TV, radio and outdoor are necessarily straightforward.

For imagery, we sought to differentiate the CO-OP with photography that reflected the CO-OP’s “by the people, for the people” vibe. The usual polished perfection found in traditional healthcare imagery didn’t cut it. Instead, we recruited pictures from the Instagram accounts of friends and family to establish the look we wanted. Over time, these images will be replaced with those of actual members through a special feature built into the site. 

Responsive design combined with greater simplicity

Most health insurance websites overwhelm users with dozens of links, starting on the homepage.  For Mountain Health, we sought to create as much visual simplicity as possible, dramatically reducing the number of choices that confront users. 

In addition, marketing research told us that many low-income people rely on their phones as their only connection to the Internet. Using responsive design techniques, we made sure even more complex pages (like plan details) are easy to use and look great from any device—computer, tablet or phone.

Finally, we replaced dozens of individual plan brochures with a single, printed piece that displays all of Mountain Health’s plans in a single view, making side-by-side comparison much easier. Montana Health CO-OP was so pleased with the new campaign, they adopted it for Montana as well.

Brand messaging: It’s not enough to be “the cheapest”

After years of double-digit price hikes in Montana, insurance rates are growing at the lowest rate on record—only 1.35%. Some people will even see their premiums fall. This is due in no small part to the additional competition Montana Health CO-OP is providing, just as the Affordable Care Act intended.

When they announced plans to expand into Idaho last February, we were excited to help bring more affordable coverage to another state—and that’s what’s happening. Mountain Health CO-OP’s premiums are among the lowest, if not the lowest, in Idaho, typically with lower deductibles too.

But being “the cheapest” isn’t always perceived as a good thing when it comes to healthcare, especially when you’re new to a market.  Beyond raising awareness, our campaign is designed to build credibility by educating people about the unique CO-OP approach to health insurance:  member-run, with profits used to lower premiums and expand benefits.

The prices will speak for themselves.