Serge Raffard, Group Strategy, Marketing, Distribution Officer at Allianz

What are the big success stories for your brand over the last 12 months that have driven your brand strength and growth?

After two years of preparation, we launched our partnership with the Olympic & Paralympic Movements as the Worldwide Insurance Partner, recording great success on all three dimensions: people, brand and business. Tokyo 2020 was a particular highlight, with 42 Allianz Ambassadors winning 35 medals, more than 50 markets activating the partnership and over 1.1 billion brand impressions. We also brought to life our new brand positioning, Confidence in Tomorrow, for employees, customers and society, especially through the Olympic campaigns and the #SparkConfidence movement. Brand likeability increased significantly.

All the above and much more have been developed and launched around the Allianz Experience principles: Shape, Care and Deliver.

Thinking about the customer: we have a hypothesis that consumers once made purchases to signify their economic capital, then later to signify their intellectual capital, and most recently to signal their “ethical capital”. Does this hypothesis resonate with you and how do you address it from a brand standpoint? What about your brand do you fix & what do you flex?

One of the three Experience principles is Shape; the notion of shaping a better tomorrow together for our clients and society on both environmental and societal dimensions. For many years, Allianz has been a leader among insurers and asset managers in bringing sustainability into every aspect of the business. Of course, many companies showcase their sustainability goals, and many have issued statements about wanting to be climate neutral by 2050. We act and want to be held accountable.

One of our key goals is to finance the transition to a net-zero economy and protect our customers against climate related risks. As a trusted partner of the UN and a founding member of the UN-convened Net Zero Asset Owner Alliance and Net Zero Insurance Alliance, Allianz is supporting the shift to a climate-neutral global economy through implementing the 1.5°C degree target in our investment and insurance portfolios to net zero via ambitious interim targets: We have started to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions in a third of our client’s funds portfolio towards a goal of a reduction of 25 percent by 2025.  Furthermore, Allianz has set itself greenhouse gas emission reduction targets such as shrinking greenhouse gas emissions in the Allianz operations by 30 percent per employee latest by 2025.

Additionally, we have just kicked off the race to net-zero targets in our Purpose &Strategy portfolio and in the Asset Management portfolio of Allianz Global Investors.

More about the Allianz Sustainability vision and targets, visit: Allianz Sustainability Report.

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Increasingly we see that traditional industry or category conventions are less helpful to understand a brands’ commercial landscape. And that understanding and planning around consumer motivations or desires gives a better sense of the true competition. Does this hypothesis resonate with you and how do you address it from a brand standpoint?

Totally. Our Purpose is to Secure the Future of our Customers. We are the only one in that huge space and deliver on it with our insurance and asset management solutions as well as related services. To do this we need to offer functional: Deliver, emotional: Care and societal: Shape benefits. For example, when there is a claim we need to be there; not only with a cash payment but also with empathy. And this is not sufficient. We know that customers expect that we help the broader community around them, hence the Shaping part. So we work on being as fair and transparent as possible so there is no bad surprise when the claims arise. We work on our digital language and in the training of our care center staff to be empathetic. And we increasingly work with the local communities to address insurance, asset management and societal needs in terms of environment and inclusion. We track all of the above daily via our digital customer NPS and Voice of Customers programs so we continuously improve and course correct.

Post-COVID, post Social Justice – the world is settling back to a new normal. How have these events affected your brand strategy? 

Indeed, we reflected and reacted quickly to the events that impacted the world around us. For example, post the initial urgent medical and financial supports, we quickly realized that a major customer unmet need was around mental health. This was the trigger to our #SparkConfidence movement.

As a TOP partner of the Olympic and Paralympic Movements we have the privilege of spending time with athletes, and not just when the podium comes, but also during the ups and downs towards that goal. With the #SparkConfidence movement we show the outside world how athletes reached their goals and realised their dreams by never giving up; and who supported them to do so. This is another way of being a strong partner who stands behind our customers’ dreams to let them become true. And this is what the Allianz brand and our brand promise “Confidence in tomorrow” stand for.

More about #Sparkconfidence, visit: #SparkConfidence (allianz.com)

What are the major disrupters and accelerators of competition and brand growth on your horizon?

At Allianz want to learn from the best and compete with the best to achieve our Top25 brand ranking by 2025 target. Our accelerators are coherence, distinctiveness and continuous presence on our customers’ side.