Many CMOs are under pressure to drive return on investment while maintaining creative excellence.
It’s a challenge Suncorp Group, one of Australia’s largest insurance businesses, has faced itself, explained Mim Haysom, executive general manager for brand and customer experience, who spoke this week at Cannes Lions.
She discussed the brand’s transformation in recent years, as insurers in Australia have tackled how to set up their businesses against a backdrop of “severe weather events” impacting customers.
Many CMOs are under pressure to drive return on investment while maintaining creative excellence.
It’s a challenge Suncorp Group, one of Australia’s largest insurance businesses, has faced itself, explained Mim Haysom, executive general manager for brand and customer experience, who spoke this week at Cannes Lions.
She discussed the brand’s transformation in recent years, as insurers in Australia have tackled how to set up their businesses against a backdrop of “severe weather events” impacting customers.
“Insurance to most customers is very undifferentiated, it’s very same-same, so they’re very much shot on price,” Haysom said, speaking on a panel moderated by Sophie Devonshire, CEO at The Marketing Society.Gap CEO: You can’t drive revenue without relevance
This lack of identity in the category is something her team is “leaning into” with her team focused on how they can “differentiate” their brand and “create significant value” for customers in “new and innovative ways”, she explained.
“We changed strategy,” said Haysom. “Most insurers talk about price or the claims experience or what they could do for you after you’re impacted by a weather event. But we saw an opportunity to think about how we could help our customers mitigate the impact when those events hit them.”
Suncorp, now positioned as a risk mitigation and climate business beyond insurance, has since driven higher levels of customer engagement and consideration, and gained greater market share.
“Creativity is absolutely our greatest business lever to drive growth,” she said.LVMH: If we just meet the customer needs, we are dead
However, it’s still difficult to demonstrate creative effectiveness to the wider business.
“When you’ve got the data and the metrics and the success to back up that narrative, as the CMO you have to be really, really clear and obsessive about making sure the organisation understands the value and the importance of creativity,” she added.
Data, analytics and the impact of artificial intelligence were key themes at this year’s Cannes Lions.
“We have a duty to protect what I call the soul of marketing,” said Leandro Barreto, CMO of Unilever Health & Beauty, appearing alongside Haysom and Singapore Tourism Board’s top marketer Kenneth Lim on the panel, in terms of balancing data and analytics with creativity.
His advice to brands to help achieve this? “You need to hire the right talent,” he said. “We need people that actually can be brave and who can make the difference. And we need to fight against this idea that it’s all about data.”
When customers find “joy” in marketing, continued Barreto, it’s in response to creativity. Marketers must “create this contagious idea that marketing is worth it because it’s making people’s lives more joyful”, he added.
Investing for growth
Singapore Tourism Board also made a long-term commitment to marketing and growth in April with its ‘Tourism 2040’ strategy.
The project is about driving demand, developing tourism in Singapore and making a commitment to sustainable growth. Lim, then, is in the unique position of having a 15-year plan.
To make it work, he is focused on getting the “marketing fundamentals right first” and “the impact of creativity”.
This, he said, is easy to demonstrate within the team, but “difficult” to explain to non-marketers. Therefore, he is being “responsible” in terms of how the business “leverages and utilises some resources”.
The strategy is “anchored to quality tourism”, he added, and is not about “growth at all costs”. ‘Placebo effect’: Heinz’s Todd Kaplan urges marketers to ‘set a higher bar’ for success
Meanwhile, for Haysom, just two weeks into her time at Suncorp in 2018 her team was hit with a “significant” budget cut – the last thing any new CMO wants.
“I quickly focused on building a lot of data and analytics capabilities, so that we could report and share the results in a commercial way with the rest of the organisation, to tell the story of ROI, the impact that marketing is having,” she explained.
Without doing this early on, Haysom believes the business wouldn’t be where it is today.
“If I hadn’t set those foundations up right, I wouldn’t have been able to get to where we are now, where every year our budget is increasing and we’re doing great work,” she said. “You’ve got to be able to speak the commercial language of the business.”
