Marketing 5.0 for Insurers
“Markets always change faster than marketing”- Philip Kotler
From the eyes of the Great Marketer Philip Kotler, the world of marketing has evolved over the years. This evolution began from the early days of marketing, which was mostly driven by products, referred to as Marketing 1.0, later the orientation shifted towards the customer in Marketing 2.0 which transformed towards human centricity in Marketing 3.0
With the parallel advancements in Digital Technologies, Marketing 4.0 pivoted towards inclusion of digital technology applications in the world of marketing. The basic applications of digital technologies in the domain of marketing have now evolved to Marketing 5.0 which leverages state of the art technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Sensor Technologies, Natural Language Processing, Internet of Things, and plenty of upcoming innovations.
The definition of Marketing 5.0 as given by Kotler states it as the application of technologies that mimics humans to create, communicate, deliver, and augment customer value. Thus, with the current mega trend of Digital Revolution, the principles of marketing would be achieved by utilizing these digital enablers.
The use of digital tools by marketing cannot completely remove the human from the process. It is the blend of Human Touch and Technological Capability that results in the ultimate value proposition for the customers. Machines can only read human behavior and then can predict their action, but machines cannot understand the attitude and values of a human being and it is humans who can understand the motives behind actions. The future of marketing is a combination of human and digital together in unison.
The Application to Insurance Industry
Traditional marketing strategies are no longer fruitful for Insurance players, and they are now at the center stage of digital innovations disrupting the value chain. The modern concept of marketing does not solely focus on product sales but focuses on customer value from the very beginning in product envisioning, design to product delivery and servicing. The digital applications are across this enhanced value chain and are increasing in magnitude and quality with passing time.
Big Data Analytics focuses on Volume, Velocity, Variety, Veracity of data and can be utilized to completely transform the understanding of marketers about their customers. The move towards “Segment of One” requires in depth understanding of a particular customer profile, habits, demographics etc. and then offering hyper-personalized products to the customer by leveraging Contextual Marketing. The insurance players have now started to invest in Customer Intelligence Platforms (CIPs) to generate insights related to customers as well as prospects. They utilize 1st, 2nd and 3rd party data to create profiles of individuals, audience segmentation of the prospects, suggesting next best actions to the marketing team. CIPs leverage AI and ML algorithms to generate these insights allowing the marketing team to approach and convert customer by creating and communicating the right value to the right customer.
Utilizing Predictive Marketing, the insurers can utilize predictive analytics to predict their outcomes in their marketing plans, campaigns as well as utilizing the same for optimizing their customer servicing operations. They can predict frauds within a claims application, or customer onboarding and this results in a reduction of frauds which further reduces premiums for the genuine customer and increases their value and experience. Apart from fraud predictions, these also assist insurers to predict Customer Lifetime values for a customer, also provide a satisfaction score for a customer to predict their attrition etc. These techniques assist insurers to plan and reduce their uncertainties.
The utilization of Augmented Marketing to improve productivity of customer facing executives by leveraging human mimicking technologies result in improvement of customer experience. Increasing usage of Chatbots, Voice bots, AR/VR Avatars by players in India like HDFC Life, Bajaj Allianz General and Life, ICICI Prudential Life etc. showcases the changing trend. The warmth of the human centricity is blended with the convenience and availability of the digital interface. This blend results in the winning proposition in these changing times for the insurers.
The Future Ahead
Apart from the promises and exuberance provided by the digital applications, there lies roadblocks along the way. The issue of digital divide raises issues of availability for the digitally inept population who lie at risk of exclusion. The insurance marketing teams should consider the varied inequalities within their target markets and subsequently prepare their marketing plans to include everyone equitably. Hence, it is pivotal to keep human centricity at par to the technological prowess. The ultimate goal of providing superior customer experience should be constantly remembered during value creation, communication and delivery by leveraging Marketing 5.0
“Marketing’s purpose always is to enhance people’s lives and contribute to the Common Good.”- Philip Kotler
References:
A) Marketing 5.0: Technology for Humanity by Philip Kotler, Hermawan Kartajaya, Iwan Setiawan published by Wiley
