As an industry, insurance has long carried the stigma of seeming slow to keep up with the times and being reluctant to innovate. But between opera singers, meerkats, nodding dogs and geckos – is it a reputation that extends to insurance marketing?
In conversation with Insurance Business, marketing leaders from across a variety of industry sectors lent their decades of insight to assess how brand marketing in insurance and financial services has changed. Lynn Cufley (pictured left), senior director of marketing communications at Crawford & Company, and Miriam Boote (pictured right), MD at the creative agency Designate, underscored the evolution of insurance marketing.
“When I first started, insurance marketing was more conservative, product-driven, and reactive,” Cufley said. “But with digital transformation and shifting customer expectations, it has evolved significantly, and so has the function that enables it.”
With a career spanning a couple of decades, Boote noted that she has witnessed a huge change in the way insurance and financial services brands “show up”. In 2005, she said, brand marketing was much more conservative and insurance marketing in particular focused on when the worst happened, always including the negative.
The philosophy of the team at Designate is to quickly accentuate the positive in advertising – which was the thought process behind its rebranding of Liverpool Victoria to LV=, the creation of its ‘green heart’ logo and its stated mission to “look after what you love in life”. Since then she said, the market has followed suit, understanding the potential of emotional advertising and distinctiveness and cut through, which has given the world a host of characters and brand icons.
Conny Kalcher (pictured below, left), group chief customer officer at Zurich Insurance Group, highlighted how, traditionally, the industry has focused on selling products and the expertise of its broker and agents, rather than on selling an experience to customers. As a result, she said, brand marketing in the sector has been absent and often focuses on what can go wrong.
“At the same time, the only customer touchpoint - aside from the initial policy purchase - was often taking place after the worst had happened and a customer needed to make a claim – reinforcing the negative association to insurance,” she said. “Now, customers expect less transactional relationships, so the insurance industry is shifting towards a more proactive approach.”
Insurers are increasingly focusing on prevention and value-add services as well as protection, Kalcher said, meaning they take a more proactive role in their customers’ lives. Communication with customers should happen before a claim needs to be made, and, if a claim does arise, both during and after this process.
“Brand marketing has evolved to reflect this shift,” she said. “And today our tone is more positive and includes proactive content around risk prevention.”
Tim Crighton (pictured directly above, right) said that, by and large, he doesn’t think the insurance and financial sector has been particularly innovative in its approach to brand marketing. Nor has there traditionally been the large emphasis placed on marketing that there is in other sectors. The big exception to this rule has been the proliferation of the aggregators and their stand-out marketing campaigns.
“Long lasting marketing and advertising campaigns costing millions of pounds have occurred, in a true B2C “buy now” with no human interaction, taking insurance into a new dimension,” he said. “It has been strange the same growth hasn’t happened with small sole trader/SME package policies yet; I think the human touch is still valued in this market.”
However, Crighton added that that’s not to say that marketing is an afterthought in insurance. Insurers and brokers alike have generally opted for a “safety first” approach, he said, with stale but dependable names, logos, straplines and imagery. “For insurers, key sponsorships have been with sports, such as rugby and golf, targeting wealthy senior management and business owners to adopt their brand in the insurance decision-making.
“For insurance brokers, most have made sure they have a website of sorts and that’s about it on the marketing front! The select few that have paid attention to the evolving marketing landscape, the power of content, SEO and sponsored ads, have often been very successful indeed.”
Offering an example of positive change in action, Cufley noted that the firm understands all too well that its people are its brand. “Our people are the ones communicating our value to clients, and we’ve aligned our approach to reflect that. Our strategy centres around creating, ambassadors, thought leaders and experts to help us reinforce our expertise.
“In a competitive market, standing out is essential. By combining marketing and communications into a more proactive function, we’re not just reacting to market needs but anticipating and shaping them. Focusing on our people as brand ambassadors has had a real impact on how we're seen both inside and outside the company.”
