Customer is key to IAG growth, says new marketing boss

Insurer IAG’s newly-appointed chief customer and marketing officer, Michelle Klein, speaks exclusively to The Growth Agenda about her vision for NRMA Insurance and the opportunity for tech in Australia.

New IAG chief customer and marketing officer, Michelle Klein. Photo: John Feder/The Australian.

Michelle Klein left Sydney around 25 years ago, outward bound to London on a backpacking trip — a well-travelled path for many Australians.

The day before she boarded the plane, The Sydney Morning Herald greenlit her idea for a column titled The Big Trip, which she pitched in a manila folder to the travel editor at the time.

Ms Klein wanted her travel tales to run in print as well as online for the benefit of similarly curious travellers who were increasingly turning their attention to the internet for information.

Repatriating to Australia in May to take up a new role as insurer IAG’s new (and first) chief customer and marketing officer, Ms Klein reflects on her Big Trip idea more than two decades later: “It was what kickstarted where I was ultimately going to end up, which is storytelling, creativity and connecting with people, and digital.”

Ms Klein has returned to Australia with her family and a career that so far has taken her to the upper echelons of marketing leadership in five continents for global brands including Diageo, British Airways, Orient Express and Armani.

She was also at Meta for a decade, most recently as vice president of global business and product marketing.

IAG is the owner of NRMA Insurance and the newly-created role was driven by NRMA Insurance chief executive Julie Batch, with the “chief customer officer” position and similar roles becoming increasingly recognised within the C-suite as critical for business success. It is well understood in many high-performing businesses that growth often comes from a deep understanding of the customer.

“Putting customer and marketing together, I believe, is the future of marketing,” Ms Klein said.

“By putting customer and marketing together as one team is this huge shift, and the creativity will come out of us being customer obsessed.

“That means being super data driven, understanding those true insights that really relate to a customer’s need, and then designing experiences that are extremely relevant to them, versus us pushing out what we think they might want to hear about.”

Just three months into her new role, Ms Klein said she spent two of her best days in the business, so far, at NRMA Insurance’s claims centres in Sydney’s Hurstville and Marrickville, where she observed how teams interacted with customers.

“Our people are deeply thoughtful, helpful and stand for everything that the brand manifests in the world,” she said.

Ms Klein’s role marks an evolution of the chief marketing officer role, previously held at IAG by Brent Smart, one of the country’s top marketers, who left the company last year to join Telstra as CMO.

Ms Klein has a strong NRMA Insurance brand foundation upon which to build.

Mr Smart and his team, together with creative agency The Monkeys, led a five-year brand-building mission to return the brand to its brand promise of Help. This was achieved with a strong media investment against the brand work, rather than over indexing on performance, and creative work.

The brand work focused on emotionally-driven storytelling to connect with audiences, including the renowned ad campaign that featured the vulnerable koala and the accompanying line: “Every home is worth protecting”.

In recent years, NRMA Insurance has made industry headlines for the success of its marketing investment, and has been celebrated as a masterclass in creative-led effectiveness. Its campaign won a prestigious Grand Effie in 2021, and was named the strongest insurance brand in 2022 by consultancy Brand Finance Australia. The Help platform is a message Ms Klein intends to continue.

“The thing about insurance is that it’s often seen as a grudge purchase. But actually, when you need it, in a moment of real truth for human beings, it’s existential. So I actually think of it as an emotionally-driven purchase,” she said.

“(That’s) what I’m here to do. Creativity is a given. It will continue to be how we show up and bring the brand to life. But manifesting Help, day-to-day, particularly in moments of crisis, is really where we can take the brand.

“We’ll continue to make beautiful ads, but I want customers to walk away with a feeling.

“After they have an experience with this brand, whether it’s with a human being in the claims centre or by showing up in a local community and providing free education around resilience, or the experience that you have through any of our services.”

Ms Klein has left Silicon Valley, but she said her tech experience will infuse her work at IAG.

She also thinks there is opportunity for innovation and growth in the Australian tech sector more broadly. “We’re behind in tech innovation. We’re not an emerging market by any stretch, but we sort of behave like one when it comes to technology. I think we have an opportunity here across the Australian market to behave more like tech companies,” Ms Klein said.

“What I mean by that is, how do you make the company more agile, more iterative, more experimental (and) less afraid of taking some calculated risks? “

Earlier this month, the Tech Council of Australia released a report that found Australia has indeed become more successful at starting new tech companies, with a 78 per cent increase in start-ups founded since 2013.

And while more than 20 unicorn tech companies have been started in Australia “the challenge now is for Australia to scale companies beyond Series B”, according to the report, which has set out a series of policy recommendations at both a state and national level.

Without action, it estimates the country could face a $53bn funding gap relative to other markets.

Ms Klein echoes the sentiment: “I want Australia to be the country where new ideas have been incubated and launched, and scaled globally and quickly.

“And you have some incredible examples of companies who have done that, like Atlassian. But I do think that the opportunity is to incubate here and then scale to the world. That’s part of what drew me to IAG. When I met the leadership, I felt that spirit of ambition and transformation. But really laddering back up to what that company stands for and making the world a safer place.”

“This decade must be transformational,” she said.