Treating customers fairly: the rule that shapes every campaign brief

The brief says: primary message, "stay with us and save". It is a retention campaign for motor cover, the client wants loyalty rewarded, and the line tests well with the audience. It is also unwritable. Since 1 January 2022 the FCA's pricing rules require that a renewing home or motor customer is quoted no more than an equivalent new customer would pay through the same channel, so a loyalty saving is either worth nothing or a claim the pricing file cannot support. Fair treatment reaches marketing as a wording problem at brief stage, weeks before the approval and review steps the other lessons in this module mapmapUsing software to automate repetitive marketing tasks and campaigns, enabling personalisation at scale across channels like email, web, and social.View full definition → out.

What the obligations actually oblige

Two things sit behind every test below. Fair treatment: FCA Principle 6, sharpened by the Consumer Duty, whose cross-cutting rules require firms to act in good faith and to avoid causing foreseeable harm. And fair value: under the FCA's product governance rules an insurer must identify a target market for each product and hold an assessment showing the price is reasonable against the benefits delivered. The EU's Insurance Distribution Directive (2016/97) imposes the same target market discipline and requires distributors to act honestly, fairly and professionally in the customer's best interests. US state UDAP statutes prohibit deceptive marketing but carry none of the fair value machinery, which is why a compliant US creative can still fail a UK review.

Marketing inherits both documents. Product owns the target market and the value assessment; the brief either respects them or contradicts them in public.

Test 1: does the target market survive the media plan?

Take a guaranteed-acceptance over-50s life plan. No medical questions, fixed premium, fixed sum assured. Two structural features shape who it can serve: the first year or two normally pays out only for accidental death, and a customer who lives long enough can pay in more than the policy will ever return. Aim that product at 78-year-olds with the headline "acceptance guaranteed", and every word is accurate while the media plan is buying people the product cannot help.

So the brief line to write is not the audience the product serves. It is the audience it cannot serve: age bands above the acceptance cap, segmentssegmentsDividing a market into distinct groups of customers who share similar needs, characteristics or behaviours, so each group can be served with a tailored approach.View full definition → whose likely premium-to-payout position is negative, anyone whose existing cover makes the purchase duplicative. That list then has to appear in the exclusion settings, not only in the strategy deck.

The failure mode arrives later. Lookalike and value-based audiences retrain on whoever converts, and older, less price-sensitive buyers convert well on this product. The audience drifts outside the stated target market without anyone editing a single word of copy, which is why the target market check belongs at each optimisation round, not just at launch.

Test 2: foreseeable harm sits in the words, not the segment

The FCA's guidance on vulnerability (FG21/1) treats it as arising from health, life events such as bereavement or job loss, low financial resilience, and low capability, including language and digital barriers. It is situational and often temporary. The FCA's own consumer research puts roughly half of UK adults as showing at least one characteristic of vulnerability, which kills the tempting shortcut: you cannot target your way out of this. Excluding a segment is not a defence when the segment is half the market and changes weekly.

That pushes the work into the copy. The FCA's Consumer Duty guidance requires firms to avoid causing foreseeable harm through communications, which covers manufactured urgency. The distinction to hold: a real deadline can be stated flatly, with the date, because a rate table genuinely changes or a promotion genuinely closes. "Lock this in before it's too late" invents a scarcity the product does not have, and it lands hardest on the person who has just had a diagnosis.

Practical test for the brief: describe the emotional state the audience is most likely in when the ad reaches them, write it down, then read the headline back in that voice.

Test 3: pricing and renewal wording

The pricing rules bite per channel, so there is no shelter in a distribution model. Direct Line, which sells motor and home cover direct rather than through price comparison sites, is inside the same equivalent-new-business-price obligation as any broker-fed book.

Renewal wording carries a second constraint. Since April 2017 a renewal notice must show last year's premium next to the new one, and after four consecutive renewals it must prompt the customer to shop around. Retention copy therefore sits a few centimetres from a number that will contradict any "we've held your price" claim the moment the premium moves. An incumbent with a large renewal book, Aviva for instance, can promise service, multi-product bundling or no-claims protection in that pack. It cannot promise a loyalty price.

Fair value is the sharper edge, because good wording cannot rescue a weak product. When the FCA looked at guaranteed asset protection cover in 2024, it found that only around 6% of what customers paid in GAP premiums came back as claims, and firms paused sales. Every ad in that category could have passed a headline-versus-exclusion check and still been unfair.

The brief-stage checklist

• Target market line: the audiences the product cannot serve, named in the brief and mirrored in the exclusion lists the media plan actually uses.
• Harm line: the moment the audience is in, plus a note on any urgency language and the real date behind it.
• Price line: every saving or price claim tagged with its comparator, its channel and the date the number stops being true.
• Renewal line: the copy read against what the renewal notice will show the same customer three weeks later.
• Comprehension line: a non-specialist repeats the main exclusion back in their own words. If they cannot, the ad is wrong even where the footnote is right.

What it costs when the wording is wrong

In 2023 Direct Line Group, which sells the motor and home products under discussion, set aside roughly £30m to put right cases where the renewal pricing rules had not been applied correctly, affecting hundreds of thousands of customers. The mistake was operational, in pricing systems. The exposure was communicated in renewal documents, which is what made it a marketing artefact as well as a pricing one. Redress at that scale then generates its own campaign: mailings, call scripts, a landing pagelanding pageA standalone web page built for a single campaign goal, designed to maximise conversions by removing distractions and focusing visitors on one action.View full definition →, all written under legal control on someone else's timetable and none of it in the year's budget.

The direction of travel has been consistent since the FCA's general insurance add-ons market study in 2014: the regulator examines the price and value of the thing being sold, then the words used to sell it. In the EU, national authorities acting under IDD can suspend a firm's distribution permissions, which is worse for a marketing team than a fine because the campaign stops and the pipelinepipelineAll active sales opportunities across the stages of the sales process, together with their combined potential value and probability of closing.View full definition → stops with it.

🎬 [VIDEO: "What is Treating Customers Fairly (TCF)?" - youtube.com - a short explainer breaking down the FCA's TCF outcomes and why they matter for regulated firms, useful as a primer before applying the concept to marketing briefs]

Key takeaways

• Write the target market as an exclusion list. Naming the audiences a product structurally cannot help (acceptance caps, negative premium-to-payout positions, duplicate cover) is the only version of the statement that survives contact with a media plan.
• Audiences drift after launch. Lookalike and value-based optimisation retrains on whoever converts, so the target market check has to repeat at each optimisation round, not just before the first impressionimpressionThe total number of times an ad or piece of content is displayed, regardless of clicks. Each display counts as one impression, even to the same person.View full definition →.
• Vulnerability cannot be targeted away. With roughly half of UK adults showing at least one characteristic of vulnerability, the foreseeable harm test applies to the words in every ad, not to a segment you exclude.
• Loyalty pricing claims are gone in UK home and motor, and renewal notices show last year's premium beside this year's, so retention copy has to sell service, bundling or protected discounts instead of a price advantage.
• Fair value fails independently of copy quality: the FCA found only around 6% of GAP premiums returning as claims, and no headline rewrite would have saved that product.