Allianz Commercial
Creating a global powerhouse
Closing the gap in client services between large corporate businesses and mid-sized companies
The fundamental principles of branding remain consistent across B2B and B2C marketing. Both consider audience, competitors, points of difference and sales channels—with one major difference: complexity.
One of the unique B2B challenges, especially for insurance brands like Allianz, lies within the often strict differentiation between large corporate and mid-sized business clients.
Large multinational businesses usually require highly specialized solutions. However, smaller organizations benefit more from standardized and cost-efficient offerings. In most cases, this causes separate go-to-market strategies, including separated staff, sub-brands, lengthy processes, as well as fundamental differences in customer journey, and overall brand experiences.
Additionally, this leads to a significant challenge: businesses tend to overlook and underserve larger mid-size clients that sit on the edges of both solutions (specialized vs. standardized), leaving a highly relevant share of the market unaddressed.
In 2021, Allianz reached out to Interbrand to help solve this challenge of integrating its commercial businesses under Allianz Commercial. This leverages both the power of the strong Allianz brand as well as even further strengthening it through a clear, compelling and pointed commercial perspective.
Transforming into a global commercial powerhouse
True to Allianz’ ambition of “building a commercial powerhouse that dominates the market” the business set out to evolve and adapt the go-to-market strategy to become more consistent and coherent across various customer segments, while bridging the highly relevant gap of underserved larger mid-sized companies.
To accomplish this, Allianz defined an extensive roadmap of brand and business decisions, combining Allianz’ large and mid-corps offerings as well as commercial specialty services.
Following dedicated customer research, in 2023, Allianz set out to a widespread transformation of its commercial division, aiming to create one global face to the market for brokers and clients, as well as a simple, straight forward and internationally understandable name: Allianz Commercial.
“We have successfully transformed into Allianz Commercial and consolidated our position as a leading global insurer and active asset manager. We take our societal responsibility seriously and utilize our strength, stability, and expertise to tackle the underlying causes of polarization and safeguard the future of those who rely on us”, says Emil Janssens, Global Head of Marketing at Allianz Commercial.
“We are proud to have supported the global Allianz Commercial brand and marketing team throughout this significant transformation, ranging from enhancing broker & client experiences, providing governance support along its newly defined footprint, all the way to the Allianz Commercial launch campaign”, comments Simon Thun, Global Chief Client Officer at Interbrand.
Creating lasting impact for future-proof growth
The new Allianz Commercial face-to-market, that is implemented in 40+ countries, delivers a consistent value proposition, a distinct visual identity (based on the Allianz masterbrand) and stronger presence in the markets through various assets, benefitting both internal and external stakeholders. With this dedicated evolution, Allianz Commercial purposefully builds an experience environment to boost both long-term brand perception and trust, while also driving short-term sales success.
Further, a clear and coherent global brand steering and governance system has been put in place to ensure consistency and growth for the years to come.
This bold move once again strengthens Allianz’ position as a market leader and has only been possible because of the particularly strong Allianz brand, the global scale of the business and the joint efforts across all business divisions (e.g. Commercial, Trade, and B2C) to drive not only marketing, but also business growth and leadership.
“Since the introduction of Allianz Commercial we transformed internally to service our brokers in a holistic way and providing them with enhanced customer experiences, an expanded product range, and improved cross-selling opportunities. As for the brand, we already see a strong indication of acceptance in the market (reaching competitive awareness & consideration levels within the first year)”, comments Janssens.
Following the renaming in 2023, Allianz Commercial has experienced a significant increase in profitability, generating an operating profit of €2.6bn, and strong business growth for both mid corps and Speciality Services.