Developing the brand of a joint venture between two financial companies

• Main Author: Castro, Ma. Monique G.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2017
• Subjects: Financial institutions > Management; Life insurance; Branding (Marketing)
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_masteral/5788
• Institution: De La Salle University

In the last 10 years, the life insurance industry has been aggressive in marketing its products, services, and recruitment of insurance agents in order to increase their sales and market share. We have seen one company use an array of celebrities and local actors to endorse them while a new entrant has been changing the landscape with the use of non-traditional visuals and marketing collaterals. Advertising spend has increased significantly and use of social media as a platform to promote life insurance has been prevalent. This noise in the category stems from the glaring statistic that as of 2015, life insurance penetration remains low at 1.84%, lower than average 3% across Southeast Asian countries (Insurance Asia News, 2015). Life insurance companies have a long way to go in terms of market penetration hence, the need to put their brands out there. One life insurance company formed in 2009 has been quiet in terms of marketing and advertising however, it has moved its way up to the 4th rank in total premium income in the life insurance category by focusing on its operations and sales. For its credibility, the company has been leveraging on the brand of its parent companies-two of the leading financial companies in the country who have a combined expertise of over 100 years. However, with its ambition to dominate the life insurance category in the coming years, the company recognized that it needed to start making itself known to the public in order to attract more customers and be chosen amongst an array of different life insurance products that are very similar. The company recognized the need to have a brand identity and increase brand awareness. Branding has emerged as one of the top business priorities of companies in the past years, and this is due to the various benefits of having strong brand equity. Brands differentiate the supply (Kapferer, 1992). Brands affect the consumers choice and consideration according to the study conducted by Erdem and Swait (2004). Brands are considered as intangible assets and various frameworks have been developed to understand, measure, and build brand equity (Keller and Lehmann, 2003). Further, strong brands are able to charge a significant price premium with brand loyalty resulting to higher firm valuation (Fischer, 2010). Through an action research approach, we were able to define the brand of the life insurance company. This methodology fits because crafting a brand strategy involves a lot of dialogue, inquiry, and reflection. This action research project forms part of the overall strategy of the company to be the market leader in the next years. At first the company only aimed to increase its brand presence in order for more people to know about it, but through a series of reflections and analyses, the company then went through a brand development exercise and defined a full brand identity and strategy encompassing all the functions of the company. With this new brand strategy, the company is poised and on its way to reach its full potential and maximize the opportunities in the market. As head of communications who joined the organization in October 2015, the project has allowed me to quickly put value in the company as I redefined the company's brand strategy in my first year. It involved a lot of changes within the organization; moreover, a transformation, coupled with rigorous alignments with the parent companies to allow the organization to have its own identity. As stated by Ind (1997), to succeed, the venture needs freedom, but that freedom has to be in the context of the venture serving the needs of the parents strategies (p.131). A project that I initially thought was only about advertising led to a wider strategic endeavor that changed the entire organization in 2016.