Building a Brand in Dangerous Times

How consumers really feel about insurance companies is not where it needs to be. So Aviva Canada has launched an ambitious campaign that will spark conversations and offer a different way of looking at insurance. It is a bold growth strategy for Aviva and its broker partners, but also an overdue step by insurance companies to raise the bar of customer expectations and delivering on value and trust.

When you ask average consumers about their perceptions of insurance, it’s difficult for many in the industry to accept the answers. Even given a lengthy soft market characterized by generally lower premiums, most consumers still view insurance as a “necessary evil.” Although there is no consumer crisis at the moment, we have to ask: how much longer will insurance retain the current low profile? And more fundamentally, are current perceptions a good place to be at all?

Scratch below the surface and you get a range of consumer responses: indifference, residual distrust around the complexity of insurance, as well as a sense that basic needs are just not being met. After extensive consumer and broker research, Aviva believes that, simply put, most consumers don’t feel they get value for their insurance dollar.

So Aviva Canada faces a challenge: If it wants to build its brand with consumers, how should it gain their attention in the first place? How might the company overcome the underlying issues and start to build more positive connections?

The answer is an ambitious and visionary awareness campaign. First, build credibility by acknowledging things really should be better for consumers. Second, make the commitment to fix it. Our mission is to change how the consumer views Aviva Canada and our industry. Our tagline is ‘Let’s change insurance.’

“This campaign is very simply the right thing to do for consumers and the right time to do it,” says Robin Spencer, president and CEO of Aviva Canada. “We need to give consumers a unique and compelling proposition to ensure they feel absolutely confident that what they buy is what they need — and that they get full value for their money.”

PROVOCATIVE CAMPAIGN

The campaign is a significant investment for Aviva, and a new direction. When Aviva’s brand was created in 2003, the initial focus was on employee and broker awareness. Now, Aviva will establish a closer connection with consumers, helping its broker partners to sell products and solutions from a recognized company.

For years, Aviva Canada’s employees have asked why the pany hasn’t invested in the consumer brand. The turning point came in 2006, when the company’s key broker partners started challenging the company to help the brokers grow by developing Aviva Canada’s own brand. The brokers’ logic is simple: it is easier to recommend and sell policies from an insurer of which customers have heard. Accordingly, we embarked on a mission to understand what was driving consumer behaviour. This unearthed insights that now drive the current brand strategy.

The research showed consumers who consider switching insurance are almost twice as likely to choose a name they know. This migration to a preference for more recognized names is a change from just a few years ago; many brokers are keenly aware of this trend. So Aviva is now stepping up to the plate to deliver its brand to the consumer.

Aviva has involved its broker partners as it has developed key insights and thoughts about what was needed for success. This included discussions about how broker office staff — CSRs and producers, for example — could capitalize on the Aviva campaign as a springboard for conversations with consumers, and what support would be needed to achieve that.

Many people have likely seen the launch of this Aviva initiative through a full “surround-sound” campaign. The company invested in television, print, digital media and a microsite — www. changeinsurance.ca — to get its message across and engage consumers. Tactically, Aviva is going to the market with provocative positioning to break through the underlying passivity of consumers regarding insurance.

“This first phase aims to build awareness of Aviva and to earn the right to engage the consumer about who we are and what we stand for,” notes Paul Fletcher, senior vice president of marketing for Aviva Canada. “We do this by acknowledging consumers’ frustrations with our industry, by declaring we believe positive change can happen, and by standing up to take the lead on making it happen. It’s a very public commitment and it certainly raises the bar for us.”

The campaign captures consumer attention and generates interest with simple, yet sophisticated devices to share the message. “This amusing approach also helps us stand out from the crowd by showing we are grounded in the reality of our business and have a sense of humour — a very human trait in an industry that many consider to be faceless,” Fletcher says. “Most of all, however, we aim to deliver a consistent message consumers can believe in.”

Aviva’s intent is to stimulate meaningful conversations among consumers, between consumers and brokers, and between consumers, brokers and Aviva employees. We need to acknowledge how people feel about insurance. Over time, Aviva’s aim is to address those feelings and concerns. Potentially this can be done through the use of simpler, less-complex language, demonstrating the company appreciates its customers are real people who have busy lives, and by delivering superior value for money.

Some would say this is easier said than done. We recognized early on that any branding campaign would have to be about much more than simply throwing a trademark out into an increasingly noisy financial services marketplace.

Fundamentally it is about how everyone at Aviva operates every day, how its employees interact with consumers and its broker partners, and how the company is stretching to do both the simple and difficult things better. Aviva knows that in order to be successful, it needs to partner closely with brokers and claims service partners to meet consumers’ needs.

Changing how consumers feel about insurance is ambitious; it’s not a challenge with a single answer. The business strategy is multi-faceted, involves all aspects of the business and will be a multi-year journey. It will align all operating companies, branches and employees under a common goal and a united Aviva message. Although this campaign is part of the push to build Aviva’s global presence, it is definitely a ‘made-in-Canada’ campaign. The payoff comes once Aviva has been established in the minds of consumers; at that point, the campaign can develop in different directions in the years ahead.

INVESTING IN THE BRAND

The current campaign is driven by a hard business reality: Aviva and its broker partners want to grow, and a brand that stands for something positive helps drive a growth strategy. The branding campaign can help attract and keep the kind of consumers Aviva wants; it can also act as a magnet for increasingly scarce talent. To gain traction quickly, something bold and different is needed; hence the provocative and amusing elements to the campaign. True success will only come if Aviva Canada and its team deliver on the ambition driving the campaign. Spencer concludes: “At Aviva we are completely dedicated to our shareholder commitment and we know this campaign will be long term — it will be a marathon, not a sprint.”

Ultimately only one group of people can truly judge the value of a company’s brand — the consumers.

At Aviva, the conversations have begun.

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We [build awareness] by acknowledging consumers’ frustrations with our industry, by declaring we believe positive change can happen, and by standing up to take the lead on making it happen.

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