Interbrand Thinking

Five Questions with Virginie Berçot, Global Brand Director, AXA

AXA

Virginie Berçot, Global Brand Director, AXA

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

When we unveiled our “Know You Can” brand platform two years ago, we wanted to illustrate our promise to clients; being a partner who helps them feel more confident in achieving their goals.
In 2021, we are very proud to go a step further with a new campaign which aims at broadening the impact of “Know You Can” by reinforcing it with the group’s purpose – “Act for Human Progress by Protecting What Matters” – and our new strategic roadmap “Driving Progress 2023”. The message is simple and strong: AXA gives you the confidence to progress. The more people feel protected, the more confident they will be to move forward, both as individuals, but also as a part of a collective and society. Rolled out in our 14 key markets, the 2021 brand campaign has helped boost our brand internally and externally. On the one hand, it drives strong engagement at a time when consumers and employees are looking for hope and optimism, and on the other hand, it continues to raise AXA’s notoriety and consideration in our key markets.

Another important achievement is the continued alignment between our customer and employee-facing brand. Thanks to AXA’s strong internal culture, we succeeded in developing a rich and inspiring employer brand promise. Based on real stories, our “Know You Can” EVP reflects how confidence makes a genuine difference in people’s lives; how it breaks hierarchy and drives new thinking, and ultimately how confidence inspires current and future AXA people to act for human progress.

In 2021, we have also accelerated AXA’s role and ambition in health. The first area of focus has been to develop AXA’s positioning on Mind Health. We are moving in this space with the launch of the European Survey on Mind Health (to be continued at a global level in 2022), the inclusion of psychology support into several health programs and the roll out of a global employee Mind Health program.

A second priority has been to launch our “Healthy Recovery” program: a framework aimed at encouraging customers across the world to refocus on their health and well-being despite the fears and difficulties created by the pandemic. There again we combined thought-leadership and advocacy, through AXA’s 2021 Pulse Health Survey (conducted with 1000 respondents in each of 14 countries across Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas between February and March 2021) with innovative solutions devised for customers and society at large (solutions for prevention and early intervention services such as Angel or Emma, meaningful easy-to-use tele-services, and vertical integration in regions with less-centralized healthcare systems such as Egypt, Colombia and Mexico). We were also among the first companies to fund the COVAX initiative to support vaccination in developing economies through our partnership with UNICEF.

Finally, female healthcare continues to be a strong focus for AXA, combining efforts to better understand key risks, through research and in-depth customer surveys, outreach and dedicated solutions. Our Pink Insurance Medical plan in Hong-Kong provides a multidimensional protection to women from young adulthood to menopause, through a full suite of value-added services (first-in-market offer of cosmetic treatments, refractive surgery, fertility solution and maternity care). In Japan, our Smart Care for Ladies carefully guarantees hospitalization and surgery for women-specific illnesses.

Our strategic ambition in Health also leads us to pursue ambitious technology projects, such as the digital healthcare platform launched in partnership with Microsoft, which aims at simplifying healthcare journeys and enabling customers to access a fully integrated ecosystem. Our goal is to evolve this platform into an open, global service for healthcare providers and patients, regardless of whether they are AXA customers.

All these actions prove AXA’s commitment to health issues and reinforces our future as a health orchestrator.

The more people feel protected, the more confident they will be to move forward, both as individuals, but also as a part of a collective and society

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 and what do you flex?

Customers’ needs are undeniably changing and growing and over the years we’ve seen frontiers blurring between companies and brands. Research highlights how people’s expectations have shifted when it comes to purchase, and loyalty decisions are becoming increasingly holistic. People now expect companies to act with integrity towards the environment, local communities and their employees, as well as doing their job well.

Integrity is one of AXA’s 4 core values. In our work to define our purpose, ethical behaviors were unanimously quoted by our employees as being both part of AXA’s DNA but also strongly expected of the company. Alongside our current sound and ethical business practices, AXA is making strong commitments for further positive impacts, starting with the fight against climate change. This battle has been included as one of our 5 strategic priorities for 2023.

To measure our progress publicly and transparently on climate change and biodiversity but also on inclusion, we have launched the AXA for Progress Index. It is composed of 7 mid to long-term Commitments (KPIs): reducing the carbon footprint of AXA’s investments portfolio by 20% by 2025, increasing AXA’s green investments to reach €25 billion by 2023, committing to a Green Business Target & “Build Back Better”, providing inclusive insurance protection to vulnerable populations, upskilling our teams on climate by 2023, reducing emissions by 20% on our internal operations and the DJSI. These KPIs and targets are widely available and embedded into the short- and long-term compensation of over 6000 leaders.

Finally, to encourage sustainability among our customers, we have integrated our societal commitments into our business and developed green products and services for our retail and SMEs customers, such as pay-as-you drive, Energy Check and Green Guarantee.

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?

We live in a world where customers can choose between hundreds of brands. Traditional customer motivations, such as price, product features and quality of service, are now unlikely to convince a consumer to get involved and stay with a brand.

If we talk about quality of service, customer demands are constantly evolving because improvements in service constantly reset their expectations. While customers initially appreciate better services, they quickly acclimatize, and subsequently expect and demand more. Service leaders in almost any line of business are therefore raising the bar for every organization. For the AXA brand, addressing key customer expectations today means delivering proactive, meaningful services and innovations, as well as proposing personalized interactions and connected brand experiences across our digital channels. In addition, based on the 2020 edition of the AXA Future Risks Report, we know people worldwide are more vulnerable today than they were five years ago. Hit by waves of pandemics, troubling political developments and alarming climate change, respondents have expressed doubts about their future considering these uncertain times.

That’s why today more than ever, we all need to feel confident. Confidence is a key element that helps us in the present and which we can project into the future. Thinking about the future means thinking about progress. AXA’s brand role today is to cultivate this confidence: by showcasing our products and services, reinforcing our expertise as an insurer, risk manager and healthcare orchestrator and reminding ourselves of our societal commitment that is at the heart of our DNA and our strategy, particularly concerning climate change.

Our aim is to ensure clients understand that we are here to protect, help and support them at every stage of their lives as a partner and not just as an insurer. We strongly believe that our “Know You Can” is more than a slogan. It is being integrated into our culture and all of us at AXA – employees and agents – channel it when interacting with clients and stakeholders.

In conclusion, I am convinced that our vision, brand promise, passionate people and ethical business practices ethics resonate with our customers and forge a strong emotional connection with them. And this is what makes AXA a truly unique company and brand.

People now expect companies to act with integrity towards the environment, local communities and their employees, as well as doing their job well

Post-COVID, post Social Justice – the world is settling back to a new normal. How have these events affected your brand strategy? Part of what we see with clients is a closer relationship between the consumer-facing brand and the employee-facing brand. How are you managing these dimensions together? What is challenging for you in this?

We believe that putting equal efforts into both AXA’s employer brand and customer-facing brand is key to our success.

Our brand encapsulates our entire organization, and every person within it. The protection and well-being of our employees is and needs to be truly aligned with our societal commitments and purpose. If we look back at the pandemic, we have supported our employees at AXA by reinforcing HR and internal communications. This has maintained strong links and relations among people working remotely, and we have proposed, as quickly as this was possible, for employees to be vaccinated.
In addition, it was important for us to launch the Global Employee Mind Health program from 2020, offering access to care and supporting the prevention of common health issues for our 120,000 employees. This program is currently being deployed in all AXA entities, aligning benefits offered to our employees across the globe. Another initiative improving the well-being of our people is a proposal to implement a smart working pattern, which combines the flexibility of remote work and the office as an important anchor for social interactions. We have also provided two additional days off for all employees working at AXA. We are conscious that many AXA people are passionate about their job and genuinely attached to our brand values and culture. This is an undeniable brand strength.

We have succeeded to further the coherence between the AXA vision and purpose, our business strategy and both internal and external “Know You Can” narratives. This helps to create even more synergies between employee-facing and customer-facing brands.

Our biggest challenge remains to convey what our brand means to everyone outside of AXA. And this is what my team and I do with passion every day!

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

If competition brings emulation, we believe that we must be our own disrupters. Be it on digital acceleration, product innovations or the ethics we know that people expect more from brands and companies.