Customer Case
It is vital that Folksam has a timely and accurate measure of editorial coverage of their brand, as well as the impact of their communications work on that coverage. Whispr Group’s Brand Insights report provides that vital yardstick, allowing Folksam to take an agile approach to their comms work and optimize it on an ongoing basis according to actionable data-based insights.
Head of Press
Founded in 1908, Folksam is one of Sweden’s largest insurance companies, serving millions of customers and generating around 54 billion kronor in annual income. So ubiquitous that they insure every second family home and every second person in Sweden, Folksam is a Swedish household name.
In our quarterly Brand Insights reports, Whispr Group provides Folksam with a clear overview of the brand’s presence in editorial media, including insight on:
Folksam had previously struggled to gain a meaningful analysis of their media coverage that lived up to the standard required to ease their communications work, as well as demonstrate the results of that work in a way that could be universally understood in internal reporting.
Since becoming Folksam’s head of press in 2018, Kajsa Moström has worked to improve clarity, streamlining the number of spokespeople the company uses for example, and actively seeking evidence of the impact of communications work in order to answer key questions on what’s working, where there’s room for improvement, and how to act effectively in crisis situations.
Whispr Group’s solution analyses articles and posts in which Folksam are mentioned during the quarter, filtering them according to variables like subject matter (eg: articles related to “savings”), customer satisfaction, spokesperson contribution and sustainability. Our team also analyses Folksam’s owned channels and provides recommendations on the content formats which performed best, tracking key metrics such as interaction rate and follower growth.
The editorial media analysis in the Brand Insights report includes KPIs tracking the number of editorial articles initiated by Folksam vs a target number for the year, the number of sustainability related articles vs an annual target, and the number of articles related to key subject matters like “savings” vs the yearly target.
The report also contains a more granular analysis of Folksam’s press impact, detailing the percentage of relevant articles featuring a spokesperson, whether articles were a result of Folksam’s initiative, featured their comment, or if Folksam was simply named. A sentiment analysis also clarifies how many Folksam-related articles were positive, negative or neutral in their position.
“There’s a big interest from the board and management to follow these questions. The KPIs are a way for them to understand how well we’re succeeding in our work, and we’re continuing to make these KPIs even more granular so you can really see ‘are we doing the right thing?’. Now it feels like we’re really putting together the whole picture and able to measure what’s going well.”
Along with analysing Folksam’s own performance, the report provides insights on major competitors to specific Folksam products, comparing their share of voice and outlining newsworthy events that generated competitor publicity.
“In the years I’ve worked with media analysis, a recurring question is ‘how do we compare to our competitors?’. So everyone who works at a competitive company like ours thinks it’s valuable to get some measure of that, to get an impression of how good we are compared to the competition: are we better, worse? We know that we’re very well known for many forms of insurance but not so much in pensions and life insurance for example, so this measure gives us even more evidence that shows how the work we have to do, and shows us the whole picture very clearly”.
Whispr Group’s Brand Insights report allows Folksam to measure and demonstrate the impact of their communications work in an unbiased, scientific way, helping to create unified understanding of the work internally:
“I think that being able to demonstrate the proportion of publicity that we were behind ourselves for example and measure that is a very clear signal that what we’re doing produces results.”
Being able to speedily gain an up-to-date picture of media discussions around the Folksam brand and how comms work can affect them has proven particularly invaluable in crisis situations where the company has heightened media exposure, and must act quickly and effectively, as Kajsa Moström explained:
“When there are big incidents that get a lot of media interest it’s super helpful to be able to quickly get a clear image of how things look. That was the case with a number of Folksam related stories last year. Being able to swiftly deliver the picture to management and those responsible and say ‘this is how things look as of right now’ is incredibly valuable, massively helpful in crisis work”.
“We were able to concretely say ‘we’ve done enough, the publicity has lowered’ or ‘we need to do something now’, ‘we need to continue’. Being able to instantly react when things are moving at a fast pace is very valuable, both in developing our own communication in crisis, and also afterwards in being able to demonstrate what our actions led to. It’s a great measure of our work and its consequences, showing how our strategic decisions to proactively communicate had an impact.”
