Principality
Principality Building Society: Speaking to young Wales in their language
We created a culturally fluent campaign that connected with young Welsh audiences and drove 484% year-on-year growth in new users.
The challenge
As a member-owned building society, Principality Building Society genuinely exists for the people it serves. But among 18 to 34 year olds in Wales, it was significantly under-indexing on brand awareness.
Like many financial services brands, the instinct had been to lead with the product: first-time buyer tools, savings apps, mortgage propositions. Helpful tools and services, but on their own, not relevant enough to make young people stop scrolling.
Our approach
We started, as we always do, with the audience. Before a single piece of content was created, we carried out Real Folk Community research, looking into how young Welsh people actually use social media, which platforms they spend time on, what content genuinely resonates with them, and what they instinctively scroll past.
A bilingual campaign rooted in national identity
What came back shaped everything that followed. Young Welsh people have a strong and growing sense of national identity. They’re leaning increasingly into the Welsh language as a genuine expression of who they are. For a campaign built around home, a bilingual approach was the only one that made sense.
Finding the idea audiences actually recognised themselves in
The research also pointed us toward a sharper creative territory. We leant into Principality’s mutual mindset: unlike a bank, it won’t judge your life choices or your finances. That tension between wanting to save and wanting to live, turned out to be the idea that young audiences actually recognised themselves in.
Bringing Welcome Home to life on social
That insight became the foundation for Welcome Home, a fully integrated campaign platform built around the universal tension of wanting to save while also wanting to live. The ATL campaign laddered directly back to Principality’s brand strapline, Where Home Matters, giving the whole campaign both emotional resonance and strategic coherence.
We created an ambitious bilingual social media strategy that put the message directly in the path of 18 to 34 year olds, amplifying its impact well beyond traditional media placements. Working with creators across Instagram, TikTok and Giphy, we co-created relatable content that brought the brand to life in formats that felt natural for young users.
The impact
Together, we reinforced Principality’s promise to be a place that has your back, welcoming a new audience home to the building society.
The brand strategy shift delivered measurable results. New users grew by 484% year on year, driven by a genuine understanding of the people the campaign was designed to reach.
Brand awareness in the target audience segment grew by 25% in a single quarter. On social, the campaign punched well above its weight: ad recall from social media came in just 3 points behind TV and 1 point ahead of radio, at a fraction of the cost.
The impact carried through to search too. In the quarter following the campaign, brand search volume rose by 15%, searches combining Principality and mortgages grew by 33%, and searches combining Principality and savings grew by 49%.
The Meta brand lift study told the same story. Ad recall, brand awareness and purchase intent all increased across both the 18 to 24 and 25 to 44 age groups, with the strongest gains among the youngest audience the campaign was designed to reach.
“We’ve been working with Folk for four years and have been really impressed with the team. We highly appreciate how they also use learnings to help shape their creative ideas and thinking in response to our briefs and as a regular occurrence in our ongoing relationship.”
Jack Wells, Marketing Manager – Social Media, Principality Building Society
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