We met with Laia Prunera, Marketing Director in Santalucía, to walk around Madrid and talk about strategy, creativity and the decisions that have marked her professional career. During the conversation with Javier Guadiana in Light & LightsLaia explains how the company went from working through annual pitches and very tactical briefings to asking itself a question before any campaign: what was the truth of the brand and what should make people choose it.
Faced with the short-termism that conditions a good part of the current dynamics of the industry, the path chosen in this case was precisely the opposite: give time to brand construction, define a platform with a path and opt for direct assignment to Oriol Villar to develop it with continuity. A decision that forced us to review internal processes, and this is something that is not always easy to promote from marketing in business structures where procedures, the need to justify each decision and a certain tendency toward “paralysis by analysis” can end up favoring the known option over a different bet.
When Laia arrived in Santalucía, the company worked through annual contests associated with specific communication needs. A model that allowed each briefing to be resolved, but kept the brand in a dynamic that it itself defines as too tactical. Before continuing to look for different answers for each campaign, they understood that they needed to review this system and look for a brand truth that was relevant to sustain communication beyond a specific execution.
The decision is interesting in an industry accustomed to talking about long-term relationships between agencies and advertisers, while maintaining the dynamics of contests and projects that periodically force us to start over. Building a brand requires knowledge, codes, learning and also trust so, in this case, the answer was to replace the succession of pitches with a longer-term relationship with Oriol Villar. His career is linked to the construction of platforms capable of sustaining themselves for years and evolving without losing recognition, from “Mediterráneamente” for Estrella Damm to the work developed together with Banco Sabadell.
The team saw it clearly and brought to the Council the need to work in a different way, defending a direct assignment that would allow the platform to be developed continuously, instead of opening a new competition to resolve each communication need.
In this way, the company found in service, support and its emotional dimension a territory to differentiate itself. And from this entire process emerged “A Life with You”, presented in 2024, and later “Help”, as a new expression of the same platform.
The results are where the long term stops being just a declaration of intentions. Santalucía has placed spontaneous notoriety as one of the main indicators of its brand strategy in the face of competition that, according to Laia, has in some cases investment levels up to eight times higher. But five years ago, 45% of people spontaneously mentioned the brand and now that percentage reaches 62%, having gone from occupying fifth position in the sector to being “brushing” the top 3.
The conversation also leaves other details that help understand how a brand is built from within. Laia tells, for example, how “Help” has not only been presented as a campaign towards the consumer, but also as an idea in which the employees themselves have an active role. She explains the close relationship between marketing and the commercial network at key moments of the year and recognizes that, when she received the proposal to join Santalucía, the insurance sector was not among the most attractive to her. It was by understanding the social dimension of the business that he began to look at the category in a different way.
