NRMA’s bid to become national brand delivers strong growth in new states

NRMA Insurance’s ambition to become a national Help company is showing strong signs of success as it gains traction in new states and attracts new customers.

NRMA Insurance chief customer and marketing officer Michelle Klein and Droga5 Australia & New Zealand chief executive officer Matt Michael.

NRMA Insurance’s bid to become a national brand through its “A Help Company” positioning is striking a chord with consumers.

One year on from its national launch during the broadcast of the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games, the brand has revealed that one in two new customers cite its marketing as the reason for the purchase.

It also revealed “significant” lifts in awareness and consideration in new state markets.

The IAG-owned insurance company used its Olympics broadcast sponsorship to help capture every eyeball in the country for a TV ad that showcased the brand’s new positioning through depictions of the acts of help it offers customers.

However, the repositioning work went beyond marketing activity with the business overhauling everything from logo and website design to insurance policy terms, products, vehicles, grassroots programs and sponsorships.

The move followed the appointment of a global team within agency Accenture Song to provide end-to-end solutions.

IAG chief customer and marketing officer Michelle Klein told The Australian: “Help, the idea itself, was never meant to be just a campaign, or an ad. Help is a promise and it’s been our promise as a brand for 100 years. But we needed to turn that promise into real-world action that people could tangibly experience and so pivoting from an insurance company that helps, to a Help company that just so happens to sell insurance, was our ambition.”

That pivot, and the repositioning, has resonated with audiences.

NRMA Insurance’s Olympic sponsorship outperformed all broadcast sponsor benchmarks for a second-year sponsor – in the brand’s first year.

Ms Klein said it not only delivered positive scores on reputation recall, NPS and likelihood to purchase, it also drove growth, with 50 per cent of new customers citing the Help company activity as their reason to purchase.

“We knew taking that approach of getting around a cultural moment like the Olympics with a new story with that balance of both rational and emotional and real acts of help was a way to deliver our message,” she said.

The activity has also delivered “significant lifts” across a range of metrics in key new markets South Australia, Queensland and Western Australia. Metrics including prompted awareness, consideration, reputation and preference, among non-customers have all increased “significantly and very significantly depending on the product”, according to Ms Klein.

“(People) are seeing the brand show up in places where that help is actually taking place. And that helps to boost familiarity in those new states, and ensure the brand is more visible to help drive that non-customer prompted awareness. All of those things combined are lifting awareness, recall, retention and preference.”

“We had the brand awareness in NSW, but definitely not in the new markets. As a new offering we need to demonstrate why people should switch and choose us over a local player.

“Our results in WA, Queensland and SA show us that (A Help Company) makes sense not just for customers, who already know the brand, but also for those who don’t. And it’s giving them a reason to choose.

“We have really strong retention rates, they’re in the 90 per cent range. So it’s helping us to keep the customers that we have, but also bring in net new, and getting people in new states to consider and convert as a result of understanding what we stand for.”

An artists impression of the NRMA Insurance presence at Adelaide Oval

The results reinforce the work the customer-centric approach the brand has applied to every touchpoint, said Matt Micheal, the chief executive of Droga5, which is part of Accenture Song.

“One of the reasons it has worked so well is because the strategy comes from the heart of what this organisation has always done. We took the things that NRMA was already doing and we told customers about it and it resonated. It was not reinventing anything, we were building on an existing truth.”

Mr Michael said the brand’s work with local communities through partnerships with Surfing Australia, the Adelaide Fringe Festival, the SA SES and its work to support Queenslanders around Cyclone Alfred were key elements to this.

”A big part of how we get that national movement and that national brand lift is showing up in a way that means something to those communities, especially in those other markets where NRMA is less known, it’s really important to be woven into the fabric of that community,” he said.

To test the effectivness of the messaging, NRMA Insurance leveraged its Cricket Australia sponsorship, to run a multi-policy discount offer alongside its brand activity.

“We saw really positive results on both brand and conversion,” Ms Klein said. “We now sit as the third-most spontaneously recalled brand partner with Cricket Australia. And 70 per cent of customers cited the campaign they saw during the cricket as a reason to choose NRMA to buy that second policy or third or fourth.”