Boardroom Bets to Buyer Beliefs: Bridging Insurance Marketing Strategy and Expectation

Gibson Bullock:

Hello and welcome to today's session — From Boardroom Bets to Buyer Beliefs: Bridging Marketing Strategy and Expectation.

Our TransUnion presenter today will be Karen Imbrogno who serves as a market development manager for insurance. And with that, I'll hand it over to Karen for her presentation.

Karen Imbrogno:
Great. Thanks, Gibson.

So whether you work in marketing, underwriting, claims or contact center, you're in this presentation because the next wave of insurance growth happens when all of these teams come together and they're supported by the right tools, the right data, the right strategy and technology — all anchored by a shared customer-centric vision across the organization. And when we start to break down silos and move and think as one, that's where great things begin to happen. Our execution improves, personalization clicks and loyalty grows with our customers. And that's where brands really start to pull ahead. So let's have some fun today.

Over the next 25 minutes, we're going to hop on the virtual TransUnion Marketing Tour bus. We're going to make four fast stops. I'm going to share some practical ideas and a lot for you to take back to your teams. So buckle up and let's roll.

Today, we're going to make four quick stops on our trip. Our first stop is going to be in the marketing boardroom, and it's here where I'm going to share insights into our brand new B2B study we did with senior insurance leaders across organizations. Our second stop is going to be looking at the external landscape.
We're going to go outside to see what's happening around us in terms of how brands are viewing marketing technology today versus two years ago, as well as where we're seeing shifts in marketing spend. For our third stop, it's going to be a reality check. We're going to be looking at how well we’re really measuring up to what consumers are expecting of us as brands.

And it's here that I'm going to share some insights from both our consumer-facing study as well as our B2B study. And finally, we'll wrap up the tour by turning insights into action. And I'll give you five practical ways to close the gap. So before we get into some of the findings, I think it's important I share with you a little bit about the study itself and the 100 voices powering our insights.

So, TransUnion partnered with Horizon, a third-party marketing research vendor that has deep ties in the insurance space. We asked them to conduct a blind study on behalf of TransUnion. We really wanted to understand overall perceptions as it relates to things like where insurers are placing their biggest bets in marketing today.

What are some of the challenges they're facing in marketing? Where are they on the identity spectrum and being able to recognize customers and personalization, as well as a host of other factors?

We gave our research vendor five pieces of criteria each of the respondents needed to meet in order to be included in this study. First, they needed to work for a company with over 2 billion in written premium per year. And we wanted to talk to the following lines of business whose primary line of business was either multi-line, life or PNC. Definitely wanted to talk to people who were more senior in the organization and those that are focused on either strategy and innovation, sales, risk, IT or marketing. And then finally, we wanted to make sure they have direct involvement in some of the key decisions that are made around areas like delivering seamless experiences, acquisition, retention, engagement. So as you can see here, we had a really great mix of respondents in our study.

Over half were division heads or higher and almost three-quarters were in the roles of marketing. Every one of our respondents had at least two levels of involvement in key activities. So now that we know a little bit about our respondents, let's go inside the boardroom and hear what's on their minds.

The first question we asked was: What are your top three marketing challenges you're facing in your organization? And it's not a surprise the need to demonstrate ROI to either maintain current marketing budgets or to increase marketing budgets came in at #1. Now, ROI is sometimes really difficult to get at because we have multiple projects going on at once and it's hard to isolate impact. 

And the same thing happens with campaigns. We have multiple campaign touch points that are happening. And without having a true multi-touch attribution model in place, it makes it hard to assess what channel created that next action the consumer took. And then finally, we also have projects going on that only affect the subsets of our customers, such as projects that focus on retention or claims. Now the second area is breaking down silos for better cross collaboration. This is nothing  new. This has been going on for years. Now we’re getting a little bit better in this area, but we still have a long way to go as an organization.

Sometimes, what we find when we go into organizations is we've got different people who own various parts of the lifecycle, and they're not always talking to one another. So that's creating a big challenge for brands. And then developing more granular segments to really scale our personalization efforts. Now, I do want to call your attention to the last one, aligning marketing strategy with customer expectations.

Although that one only came in at 33%, when we start to look at it by the line of business, we see a little bit different results. In fact, with multi-line carriers, 67% of those surveyed said that is their number one focus and challenge today that they're trying to solve for.

Life and PNC are still focused on ROI. Now, the one thing that did not come through, and we did give them an option, is identity resolution. That one only came in at about 15%. And it was a little bit alarming because our data that we're going to see later on in the presentation speaks otherwise.

So even though we've got these challenges in place, brands are placing some really big bets out there. And where are they? Well, first and foremost, everybody's focused on hyper-personalization and AI-driven targeting. In fact, 43%, and that's across all the lines. Same thing holds true with digital transformation and marketing technology modernization. Now, I will say on that one, we've had some challenges in place because brands over the last two years had to focus resources on profitability. And with that being said, sometimes we weren't able to get the projects that we needed to get done. And there were also layoffs that happened with many of the multi-line and PNC carriers and life carriers as well. So, when we start to look at these biggest bets by line of business, again, we see everybody's focused on the first two, but multi-line carriers are more focused on first-party data strategy and compliance. Whereas we’re seeing PNC carriers put greater focus on developing a seamless omni-channel experience.

And life is focused on customer journey mapping and lifecycle marketing, as well as first-party data. Now, the one thing I do want to share here is these last three options are all really needed in order for us to deliver on that number one bit of hyper-personalization.

So the next area we wanted to dive into is who or what is really determining what decisions we make as an organization. So we asked respondents and gave them seven options to choose from. We asked them to tell us their primary driver of decisions. But the two that we were most concerned with and wanted to learn about
were internal growth targets and revenue goals, as well as shifting consumer expectations. Now, we did ask things like competition and such, but again, what we wanted to understand was, are the internal growth targets driving more of these decisions or is the customer — or is it pretty evenly weighted? Well, let's see.

Thirty-six percent of respondents said it was the internal growth targets that were driving the revenue goals. And by the way, that was the number one response that came in. Now, shifting consumer expectations only came in at 10%. That was a little surprising for us. And really, when you look at what's setting us up for our disconnect between what brands think and what consumers are feeling. Now, in order to deliver on our biggest bets, there are really three things brands need to have in place. And these are all non-negotiables for delivering on the bets. We need the data, the technology and the organizational readiness.

From the data side, we need to make sure we've got high-quality unified data, and that data needs to be refreshed often. We need to make sure we've got this cross-channel integration, the ability for brands to see the 360° view of a customer, regardless of whatever channel they're operating in. And then we need to have strong governance and privacy and compliance in place.
This will hold particularly true as we're bringing more AI into the fold. On the technology side, we need to make sure we've got modern marketing technology in place that also has the AI and ML capabilities so we can do things like next best offer. We also need to make sure we've got real-time data processing and activation in place.

When we have things like that, we'll be able to act quicker on things like first notice of losses and definitely the scalable infrastructure so we can automate more of our personalization efforts. Now, from an organizational readiness side, it's going to be about having use cases that are all tied to KPIs that we can accurately measure.

If they're not tied to our KPIs, then they're strictly use cases. We also need to make sure we've got this cross-functional alignment happening. Marketing needs to be talking to data — that needs to be talking to technology and analytics. This is going to be key for us to be able to come to some of these big decisions we need to make for our customers. And then finally, we need the talent and processes in place to operationalize on AI. We'll talk a little bit more about AI in a bit. But overall, over half of the respondents surveyed said unified identity and cross-channel integration are really keys to brands delivering on their ROI.

But we still have a big barrier in place and that barrier is data. So let's drill down on data a little bit more.

We asked respondents to rank their top challenges with their data in their CRM strategies. And we gave them different attributes to rank on. We asked them about data silos across departments, poor or incomplete data and integration, weak collaboration between marketing, IT, and data teams, and insufficient tools. And as you can see, in terms of their top challenges, their top three challenges we're struggling. We've got some really big roadblocks ahead of us that we've got to get over. When I look at the 52%, that's over half of our customer base — and half of our respondents are saying this. So we've got to make sure we've got everything in order for us to deliver. And then finally, the tools for decisioning. Now, I want to drill down into these in a little more detail. So we asked respondents about their level of confidence in their data and their capabilities.

We gave them a scale to rank on with one being the lowest, five being the greatest, and asked them to tell us where do you think you fall in this? Customer data is relevant so you can deliver personalized offers. You have the ability to accurately identify and authenticate customers across all channels, across devices.

Get data governance and the integration processes in place to support your real-time decisioning. And then you've got the marketing technology stack that's fully integrated that gives you the ability to get to that 360° view. So as you're seeing here, what we saw come through loud and clear is brands believe they're pretty much in the middle of the road, and that's mediocre, and that's not going to be big enough or good enough for brands to deliver on their top bets. So let's drill down into marketing technology stack being fully integrated a little bit more to find out where brands are at.

Well, we asked them, where do you stand in your ability to standardize, identify and enrich data? We gave them a scale here as well that went from not started to being optimized and fully integrated into a single source of truth. Now, I want to call your attention to the orange and blue lines — which are developing but not fully integrated and operationalized but have gaps remaining. Most of the respondents surveyed land somewhere in between. But what really stood out loud and clear is the gray bar you're seeing here.

And this is being fully optimized into that single source of truth. So a total of only 4% of all respondents said they're fully integrated and they've got that single source of truth. Now, PMC and multiliner[AK1]  are a little bit further along. But we did ask them about what challenges are prohibiting it. And it's really in line with what we heard at the beginning of the presentation. And 63% said it's the data silos across departments and systems. Over 55% cited legacy technologies we have in place. That fills into the one response of where they're making investments in marketing technology. And 46% reported budget constraints. But without unified identity, AI-driven personalization is really going to stall and underperform. So we've got to make sure we have that in place.

Now, speaking of AI, we did want to understand more about where brands are making their marketing investments in AI today. So we asked that in our marketing study. What we found out over three-quarters of respondents are focused on enhancing customer data and the infrastructure so they can support all those great AI initiatives they have in place across their lifecycle — and also on integrating third-party AI platforms or tools. Now, the response that surprised me a little bit was insurers are investing in upskilling AI and ML. Now, again, this came in at 43%.

But when we start to drill down and look at it by line of business, 72% of multi-line respondents said this is where they’re focused today. So they've recognized we can have all the AI and ML efforts in place today and all this great data. But if we don't have the right teams and people in place with the right skills to analyze that and deliver insights to the organization, then it's strictly AI. So now that we’ve learned a little bit about what's going on in the boardroom, let’s make our second stop — and go outside and look at the external landscape and what's happening there.

The first area we wanted to drill into is marketing technology. What’s happening with investments today? How are they being seen today versus how they were seen two years ago? And what came through is insurers are moving more from a building mode to scaling mode.

They're continuing to invest in things like AI-driven personalization and Gen AI, CDPs and real-time data, omnichannel journey orchestration, advanced analytics and attribution, privacy and regulation, and AI and governance. But let's see how they're viewing it today versus two years ago.

Well, on the AI side, we've moved more from doing a lot of pilots and chatbots to brands really incorporating an enterprise GenAI into their marketing workflows. So that's going to help them with delivering better customer experiences, retention and also to gain efficiencies in some of their processes.

From a CDP standpoint in real-time data, I'm not going to say we've moved yet from data unification because we just saw we're still struggling in that area, but we are making progress and moving more toward real-time activation and next best offers. So we're going to be using a lot of AI in those areas and have to make sure that's governed all the way through. On omnichannel journey orchestration, it's moving from single channel campaigns to really that full lifecycle orchestration. And this is really key for customers. And we're going to touch on this in a moment as well. But how do we get to that seamless experience that looks at both digital and human customer experience and brings it all together? And by the way, that will be table stakes going forward. On advanced analytics and attribution, it's more moving from single reports to doing more work in advanced application and predict customer lifetime value. Now, we know with brands really looking to drive margins and prove out ROIs, this is really key.

Then on the privacy and regulation side, it's more movement of ad hoc risk reviews to embedding AI into everything we do with governance in place there. But brands are really… they're at the point now where they're looking for their teams to capitalize on these big investments they've made over the last couple of years.

And so performance and payback are really going to decide, did we make the right decisions on our investments?

Now, the next area we wanted to dive into is how has spending changed across marketing channels over the last two years? Well, we've definitely seen an increased focus on channel alignment. So making sure customers are seeing similar messages across the channels, and the brand, and look and feel are all the same. We’re seeing a clear shift from less on the linear TV side to more connected TV, as well as paid search and video. Now, on the last two there, that's primarily driven a lot more by the fact we've got more of these Millennials and Gen Zers — even your Gen Xers and consumers who are becoming really adept to ads being able to operate in the whole online presence in the way they want to consume content. There’s been a resurgence of direct mail. So, we're actually returning to pre-COVID levels, which is great. Brands have figured out how to really work direct mail with digital to make it work harder for them. Life's prioritizing more of the digital and agent enablement, but we’re seeing some significant shifts in spend — moving a little bit away from acquisition to a higher focus on retention and growth. We have to remember it definitely costs more to bring on a new customer than to retain and grow an existing customer.

And then finally, media spend that's aligning with what general generational communication preferences are out there. So, you know, your Boomers still want your direct mail, their phones, their traditional channels. They want things clean and easy to understand. Same thing with the visuals.

Whereas you look at Millennials and Gen Z, well, both of those groups are about digital marketing, social platforms, blogs, video, email. Millennials want educational materials delivered to them. They want brands to come through with an authentic voice and have a purpose. Gen Z is all about instant access and gratification. And they also want that socially aware messaging. The brands that are going to win are brands that are efficient; they can operate in a fast-paced environment, and where customer expectations converge, that's where we're going to see winners emerge.

All right, now we're ready for our third stop on our bus tour here. So this is going to be a reality check for us. Buyer beliefs and brand perceptions. How well are we really measuring up to what consumers are expecting from us? Well, today consumers expect so much more from brands than they did a year ago, five years ago. They want clear, defensible value. They want brands to be transparent with their pricing. They don't want to have to hunt to see what I paid for my policy in my last policy term. Be transparent with pricing and tell me the benefits I'm going to get. They want brands to provide frictionless experiences and make it easy for them to do business.

So if I'm out there and I'm doing a quote and I come back to your site, take me to the place where I dropped off. Don't require me to enter all my information again. Things like that create friction.

They want brands to be responsive to them and support them where they are and how they need it through what channels they want to communicate in. And they want that personalized level of communication. We have to remember consumers are expecting to get similar experiences they’ve had with the other great brands they work with. Okay, so everybody's got that frame of reference for a brand that does it really good. Your consumers are measuring you against that. They want relevant lifecycle engagement, personalized across experiences. You've got enough data on me. Give me things I can relate to.

And above all, they want trust, security and reliability. They want brands to deliver on their promises. Well, the good news is in the consumer survey we conducted of over 6,000 consumers, that one came through loud and clear. Brands are really delivering on that trust aspect. But consumers are also reporting even though insurers are meeting expectations, they're not wowing them and standing out. In fact, in our consumer study, 41% said they're not seeing any value beyond the renewals and claims they submit, and 42% said they’d leave their insurance carriers if renewed at a higher rate than what they're paying today. And over half said that the quote experience is at best subpar. And 65% reported their insurers are not proactively reaching out to them. With as much data as we have out there, all these numbers should be much higher. And this is going to be table stakes going forward.

Consumers want these personalized experiences. They want you to know who they are and deliver things that are going to be relevant for them. And personalization is where the reality breaks. So let's dive into personalization. This is one of my favorite topics.

Now, a little spoiler alert here. Customers are not experiencing personalization the way brands believe they're delivering it to the consumer. So, we took both of our studies and asked a similar question. On the brand side, we asked, what level of personalization do you believe your brand is delivering to your customers during interactions?

On the consumer side, we said, when you interacted with your brand, how personalized was your experience? Now looking across all stages of the lifecycle on delivering versus receiving, we see there's a clear disconnect. And this is again, all lifecycle stages combined.

Seventy percent of brands believed they're delivering personalized experiences and 43% of consumers said, maybe not so much. Forty-three percent, that's a very low number. Now, when we look at it by stage in the lifecycle, we see some even bigger disconnects.

On the acquisition side, 87% of respondents said I think we're doing a good job delivering personalized experiences — but only 33% on the claim side. Now, this one was a little bit alarming to me because this can make or break whether a customer renews with you in the future.

And claims is where everything happens. So this is an area where brands are really going to want to think about making some future investments in making it so the consumer feels the love from your brand. And when we look at it by line of business, we also see disconnects there. Now, multi-line, yes, they’re probably further ahead and PNC as well.

But we still have these disconnects that are happening. And when we look at it by generational level, it’s 32%. So let's just show the generational results, and this will give you a better idea where things live. But the bottom line is brand belief in consumer reality is facing a little bit of misalignment here.

So when we look at it by generation, again, overall, 43% believed they're getting personalized experiences. Gen Z is definitely expecting a lot more out of brands, 32%. And we see the numbers go up a little bit more as we go through the generations. But we've got a way to go here in order to deliver a one-size-fits-all approach — that isn’t going to work for consumers today. Now, we did ask the respondents, where are you in developing distinct strategies for your generations? Twenty-one percent reported having distinct strategies in place and 57% said they're tailored for some generations.

Now, in terms of multi-line carriers, all of them have something in place, which is fantastic. But again, the staff that really learns me here was 26% of PNC carriers of respondents surveyed said they have strategies in place or they don't have strategies in place and are still in the exploratory stage, and 16% are also in that stage[AK2] . So this is an area where brands really need to put more focus in order to really wow your customers.

Now, the last area we really wanted to dive into is developing that seamless omni-channel experience. So we asked both the brand and consumer about confidence in delivering seamless omnichannel experiences versus receiving them. We used a five-point scale for each.

On the respondent side for our B2B study, the scale ranged from not confident at all to very confident. On the consumer study, it ranged from I don't agree at all to I completely agree you're delivering on it. Now, what we're seeing here again is another disconnect.

Brands are somewhat confident with 96% feeling they're delivering those omnichannel seamless experiences, whereas only 71% of consumers somewhat agree those are being delivered. We have to remember our customers are judging us by handoffs. And seamless experiences are going to be the new baseline. Again, they're getting that with other great brands they're out there buying from today. So just to sum up all our key findings, customer-led strategies are really going to drive sustainable ROI as a competitive advantage for your organization.

Personalization, execution and readiness are going to be the next high-impact investments. They have to be because that's what consumers are demanding today. And unified identity and data across silos is what's going to accelerate ROI. And finally, aligning brand intent with customer experiences is what's going to help us build more loyalty.

So let's talk about some practical ways we can help close the gap. The first way is we have to break down silos and integrate, unify and modernize our martech stacks. Now, this is going to be table stakes going forward because without the integration and unified data in place, it's really hard to personalize efforts for customers. And when that happens — or when it doesn't happen, I should say — results are going to stall and customers are going to move on and go elsewhere.

The second way to close the gap is to leverage customer insights to identify some of those expectation gaps and realign your strategy around it so we can message more and make a stronger impact on generations. Now, we have to remember here that insight-led alignment is what turns messaging into measurable impact. And customer insights are what's going to turn assumptions into relevance and that relevance is then going to drive more ROI.

The third way to close the gap is to advance customer trust by prioritizing transparency and delivering more personalized, high-value customer experiences across the lifecycle itself. So, transparency is going to build trust and personalized, high-value experiences are what's going to turn trust into longer relationships where they buy more and become your advocate.

The fourth way to close the gap is enhanced performance marketing using credit-based insurance scores through prescreened marketing offers. Now, in our study, we asked about that. In 89% of multi-line and 50% of life carriers surveyed, we found these strategies provided an 85% better marketing result than the standard ITA offers. And lastly, we need to replace assumption-based marketing with customer-led decision-making. We've got to remember assumptions create gaps. Customer-led decisions are what's going to close our gaps. Remember, customers are not going to wait for your priorities. So we've got to rebuild our strategies around theirs. Let's wrap up our tour and I'd like to leave you with one quick quote.

Know what your customers want most and what your firm does best — and focus on where the two intersect. Thank you.