Bluestone Mortgages wanted to reposition itself as the lender that truly understands people who don’t fit the neat boxes of high-street banks. Working with Boulder, the brand launched The Unlendables campaign, a bold, insight-led, empathetic platform that gave a voice and a face to those often dismissed by traditional lenders.
Thousands of hardworking people in the UK are routinely labelled “unlendable”. From freelancers, divorcées, credit rebuilders, or the self-employed.
For brokers, recommending Bluestone meant challenging the established lenders and shifting ingrained perceptions. Our challenge was to build awareness of Bluestone’s role as a credible, empathetic alternative and to empower brokers to start new conversations with clients who’d been unfairly overlooked.
We personified Bluestone’s audience as the “Unlendables Family”. A family of warm, relatable characters who represent the diverse groups often excluded by mainstream lenders. By giving them personalities and stories, we humanised the issue and reframed Bluestone as the brand that welcomes those left out by others. This creative platform provided a flexible, distinctive storytelling device that could extend across multiple channels.
The unique, relatable and catchy concept was brought to life with high-quality, versatile visuals. This comprised high impact video, still image and email design created by our in-house team: all custom made for digital marketing in image sizes, text and quick turnaround for approval process purposes.
We also created multiple 6, 15, 20 and 30-second videos – for the whole family and for individual characters. Bluestone offer 5 main mortgage products for sub-prime customers. To bring these to life, we created characters and back stories that reflected the needs and individual credit circumstances of their five most typical customer types.
To support our hero ad, we created a total of 30 individual creative assets to support the end-to-end acquisition of new broker customers. These included a range of ad cut-downs as well as additional collateral and bespoke campaign landing pages. To ensure the overall success of the campaign we adopted a systematic approach that identified key customers at every stage of the buying journey, used existing partnerships to create brand affinity, and a mixture of sophisticated targeting to create bespoke customer journeys for our personas.
