#BehindtheCampaign: King Price’s in-sho-sho is sure-sure

(Image supplied)

King Price’s in-sho-sho speaks to the brand’s #UnapologeticallySouthAfrican stance.

De Wet van Deventer, head of marketing at King Price In-sho-sho says there are many things in South Africa that you can’t be too sure about.

“The loadshedding schedule. The probability of potholes being fixed before they become small dams. Whether or not there really were 10 babies. But if there are two things we can be sure-sure about, it’s that we South Africans love to laugh at ourselves and that King Price has been innovating since day one to keep South Africans covered with insurance that’s fair and logical.”

'A sure thing'

“The driving insight for the campaign came from the fact that most South Africans don’t understand insurance and thus often don’t trust their insurer. We set out to show that King Price is trustworthy and relatable,” says Nick Schilperoort of Xfacta, who has worked with King Price to entrench the insurer’s brand positioning for nearly a decade.

“After we got the campaign idea from Xfacta and King Price asked us to come up with a funny angle we jumped on it,” says Bennie Fourie of Freckle Creative, King Price’s creative agency.

“It’s such a great connection: insurance and being sure. But we knew that we had to dig deep to make it really funny.”
He explains that they distilled it down to the idea that, in South Africa, we’ve had so many instances when we thought we were sure, but we clearly weren’t.

“We thought up about 30 different scenarios and boiled it down to the handful that we thought were most relevant and funny.”

Fourie says they are very happy with the result. “And we are happy to have given South Africans more reasons to have a good laugh at themselves while being reminded about the insurance brand they can be sho-sho about.”

Beyond the ‘now-now’ moment

“The trick with in-sho-sho was to take it beyond just another ‘now-now’ moment,” says Van Deventer.

To do this, they explored the phonetic execution of the South Africanism ‘sure-sure’ and settled on the even more localised and colloquial ‘sho-sho’, an expression that is truly understood and used by all South Africans.

“And then we made sure that it built on our marketing tradition of presenting truths in funny, memorable ways,” says Van Deventer. “We take what we do very seriously for sure, but ourselves not so much.”

A permanent connection, owning a positioning

Van Deventer says that the brief was for a campaign that would establish a permanent connection in the minds of South Africans.

“We wanted a positioning that we could own well into the future.

Once we started working with the concept, we pushed it a step further to create a link between our brand and a word that South Africans say all the time without being aware of it… Until now.”

He adds, “We also wanted to highlight that King Price is an insurer you can be ‘sho-sho’ about. And what better way to do this than to change our brand’s descriptor from King Price Insurance to King Price In-sho-sho, insurance you can be sure-sure about. It’s all about building trust.”

Radio campaign

For two days, King Price incentivised announcers over five radio stations to organically say ‘sure-sure’ and ‘sho-sho’ as often as possible on air, with no brand mention.

When the brand link was revealed as part of a considered content take-over of the stations’ weather and sports slots (which, let’s face it, are both things you can’t be at all sure about) King Price tallied up the sure-sure mentions and donated corresponding amounts to a charity of the stations’ choosing.

Celebrating SA’s diverse cultures

King Price has become known for celebrating South Africa’s diverse cultures.

The farmer that was wanting to ‘do something sexy to a tractor’; the young man paying lobola with ‘kettle’; the motorist and the traffic cop having a conversation around ‘braaiiii’ day; the recipients of Covid vaccinations warning others that ‘the test tickles’. And now, there are dodgy-seeming things that South Africans should be sure-sure about…

By bringing surety to otherwise doubtful situations, the in-sho-sho campaign reaffirms that King Price can be counted on to deliver products that are right for the needs of all South Africans backed up by award-winning royal service.

Van Deventer says the campaign reaches right back to the one-word directive given by founder Gideon Galloway when the brand launched 12 years ago. Disrupt.