TDS

The challenge

By law, all agents and landlords must put tenant deposits in one of the three tenancy deposit protection schemes.

The Dispute Service Ltd (TDS) is a not-for-profit company, backed by the UK’s leading membership body for property agents, Propertymark, and RICS, the professional body for chartered surveyors. The Tenancy Deposit Scheme is part of TDS.

The Tenancy Deposit Scheme wanted to grow the number of Custodial scheme deposits under its management.

They planned to do this via new agent and landlord customers, as well as switching agent and landlord deposits from their two competitors. With a virtually identical offer from all three companies in the market, how could we differentiate the Tenancy Deposit Scheme? And how best to attract new business with a low cost per deposit acquisition?

Our approach

Our first response was to consider the brand, which was lacking in visual stand-out.

While TDS wasn’t looking for a full re-brand, we identified where core brand assets could work harder. Much of its business activity and customer acquisition is online, so any change needed to be digital. Our recommendations were for a simpler, more robust logo, a single, unified font and a punchy, extended RGB colour palette.

From a behavioural perspective, we wanted to transform the simplicity of everything – from the approachability of the brand to the language used and the whole customer experience.

We looked to amplify digital performance through bold, interruptive creative, relevant and tailored messaging, and flexible ad formats. To maximise budget effectiveness, we sourced a series of illustrated characters, which we adapted into a unified set and animated for use in small-space advertising as well as targeted YouTube videos.

The campaign

Our strategy was to serve digital ads to relevant audiences, leading to incremental Custodial deposits.

We adopted a test-and-learn approach to identify the paid media channels and audiences that performed best at each stage of the marketing funnel. We took a holistic view of the customer journey and made recommendations around landing page optimisation and CRM. As a result, Tenancy Deposit Scheme has been able to define a clear digital marketing strategy to pursue further growth.