But it was a different story in 1797, when wine merchant and banker Thomas Bignold found no one was willing to insure him against the many highwaymen that lay in wait on the roads at the time.

As a result, Bignold founded Norwich Union, which, as well as highway robbery insurance, also offered cover against fire. More than 200 years later, that company is now Aviva. Not only the UK’s largest insurer, it also offers savings and investment products, and has more than 31 million customers worldwide.

Loyalty beyond price

Unlike many of its competitors in the insurance sphere, Aviva does not appear on any price comparison sites. According to its head of marketing, Neil Costello (pictured above), this is a deliberate move to drive customer engagement beyond price.

“You have to give consumers a proposition over and above what they would expect to see on those sites, to make sure that the loyalty sticks,” Costello says.

This could be added product extras that aren’t available on an aggregator, he explains, but it also spans into loyalty propositions. The company has ‘Aviva advantages’ for its customers, giving them access to discounts or competitions that couldn’t be accessed anywhere else.

With aggregators out of the equation, Aviva drives business via direct to consumer marketing – a mix across targeted media types and assets including sponsorship, TV, digital, press, direct mail and email – and business to business (financial advisers) via digital and email, with some press.

This B2B marketing is an area that Costello has been keen to shake up since he took on his role around 18 months ago. Part of what has driven this is his belief that the days of heavy paid-media spend to influence financial advisers is gone.

“I’m not that interested in a financial adviser opening a marketing newspaper and seeing a big yellow advert. What I’m most interested in is how you invest in content marketing as a discipline to drive a more relevant and personalised relationship with your audience.

“So we restructured. When I took on the role it was under the condition that we built a content marketing team.”

Costello explains that, historically, the marketing team would have been structured based on product expertise: for example there’d be an investments person and a healthcare person and a protection person. And while there’s still an element of that, the content marketing team has been formed to be responsible for marketing automation, the development of Aviva’s digital channels, and the maintenance and development of its social media channels.

As a result, Costello says, it’s vital to ensure they’re also measuring the right marketing metrics.

“We used to measure, before I came into the role, the impact of our advertising with financial advisers – who are independent anyway so shouldn’t necessarily be getting influenced by particular adverts – and the impact of paid spend.

“But you’ve completely ignored the digital market and you’ve ignored the social media influence with intermediaries. And while they [intermediaries] are laggards in terms of their adoption of social media, it’s getting faster with the new breed of advisers coming through.

“You’ve also ignored providing leads to the sales team. If you’ve got a slick CRM (customer relationship management) system and you’ve got marketing automation working properly, the days of B2B marketing being measurable are probably here now, because you can quantify how many leads you’re giving to your sales guys. “

Insight driving business

When it comes to direct to consumer advertising, TV ads and sponsorship are the two most high profile elements in the mix, says Costello. The TV ads feature actor Paul Whitehouse, who has starred in these since 2011 in a variety of guises portraying the British everyman.

On the sponsorship side, Aviva currently sponsors Norwich City Football Club and UK Premiership Rugby Union. But, Costello explains, research has shown that consumers’ recall of sponsorship can be hazy.

“A lot of people still think that we sponsor the athletics [Aviva sponsored UK athletics until the end of 2012 ] and likewise people still think that Guinness sponsors the rugby – it just goes to show how long people’s perceptions are influenced by major marketing spend.”

This kind of insight is one of the reasons that, despite Aviva’s heritage and success, the company still relies on customer research to drive its operations.

“When you see how new start-ups can disrupt a market so quickly, I think it would be remiss of any major organisation, no matter how long you’ve been around, to not have that consumer and digital insight at the heart of what you do,” Costello says.

And Costello, who has been with the company since 2005, is particularly aware of the importance of insight within Aviva. His previous position at Aviva, as head of UK research, saw him lead all primary and research activities across all categories.

And he firmly believes that this stint in a research role has made him a stronger marketer.

“I think it’s really important that if you want to be a marketer – and I include research in the marketing stable – if you want to progress within an organisation, the more rounded you are in terms of multi-discipline, the better.”

The benefits of his research experience, Costello says, also extend to helping him appreciate the nuances of commissioning and carrying out research, as well as giving him an awareness of different research approaches.

“I had a relatively short time looking after the research team, but in terms of opening my eyes to the different types of capabilities, whether that’s neuroscience, behavioural economics, visual techniques, NPS data, all that kind of stuff, it just makes your opinion a lot more credible, I think.

“What’s more, when you’re commissioning research with the research team itself, I think it’s vital you understand that altering even just the tone of voice or positioning of a question for a consumer, whether that’s online or in a face-to-face environment, can skew results enormously.”

The benefit of that experience can go both ways, says Costello. He actively encourages researchers to “test their mettle” in one or two disciplines other than research, to ensure they understand how their findings are applied into the business.

Long-term relationships

But the particular challenge for researchers within the centralised research functions of big multi-product, multi-channel organisations like Aviva, he explains, is to maintain credibility when they have to provide such high levels of technical analysis alongside trend analysis in the digital and consumer space.

This means that researchers Costello works with need to maintain a high level of product or channel expertise that will never be the strengths of all. “You’d expect a product development or a proposition expert to be the oracle for it, but the research guys need to be all over the digital and consumer trends, so that when you marry your research findings with them, you really do provide genuine insight back into the organisation, rather than just replaying facts.”

This need for expertise extends beyond the internal research team and into the insight agencies that Aviva partners with. Where a marketing agency relationship may last a few years, Costello says, a research relationship will generally last a lot longer.

“With research, you have to have a core set of agencies with a level of expertise and understanding of your market. Those relationships are probably some of the longest relationships we have in our broad marketing stable.

“In the marketing agency landscape I personally think it’s important that you continue to look out there at creative approaches, particularly in the digital environment, every two to three years or so. A research relationship would generally last a lot longer as long as both sides are comfortable with the roles they’re playing.”

And in a highly regulated market like financial services, research is a vital part of decision-making. When it comes to product development in particular, everything must go through a strict consumer testing process to ensure that it is linked to the needs of the target audience. But that regulation also means that Aviva must exercise caution in the way it uses its research findings.

Subliminal influence

For example, Aviva has recently been testing neuroscience techniques, including measuring the neurological response to the narrative of a life insurance campaign to understand emotional and brand-related responses.
“You have to be very careful about how you deploy those kinds of techniques in financial services because, given the very important nature of the regulation that surrounds our sector, to be almost subliminally influencing a consumer is not acceptable,” says Costello.

“While we do testing around neuroscience, I’d say we’re far from the space of that kind of subliminal influencing.”

But Aviva does use customer ratings and review techniques in its general insurance category; soon to be extended to the life insurance and investment categories too, “when the time is right”. This idea of allowing customers to review the company’s service propositions has an element of behavioural science to it, Costello believes.

“There’s that mass peer opinion that takes you away from just reading an expert’s view in a magazine,” he says. “We’ve all been on Trip Advisor and been influenced by the opinions of people that may not even have expertise in that space.”

The influence of peer review is perhaps even more pertinent when you consider the type of relationship that financial customers have with a brand: committing their hard-earned savings to an investment or pension over the long-term means they’re looking for qualities like credibility, heritage, expertise and a good track record. The trick then, Costello explains, is to do a lot of testing to work out where a brand can sit from a price perspective.

One segment that is particularly influenced by price, but often locked out of the market by it, is young male drivers. They are one of the targets of Aviva’s new app, Aviva Drive. The app allows a personalised price based on behaviour, meaning that Aviva can lower premiums for some drivers based on their driving. While this personalisation is important, and there’s an element of gamification in a scoring mechanism based on driver behaviour, perhaps the most crucial part is that the app gives Aviva access to regular data. And when is there ever a discussion about research these days without it turning to big data?

“I think, whatever sector you’re in, how you analyse and get insight from big data is where the battleground is,” says Costello. “From a marketing perspective I don’t think it’s harnessed yet. I see marketing automation technologies that are clever at pushing out freemium content to get consumers to trade their data with you, but that’s still relatively unsophisticated.

“The level of targeting that goes on in the digital marketing environment is moving at pace, but the sheer level of data about consumer behaviour and how you genuinely harness that to the value and the benefit of the consumer – that’s what’s really challenging.”

This article originally appeared in Impact magazine, Issue 9 April 2015.