Penn Mutual’s CMO/CDO Is In A Millennial State Of Mind
Conventional wisdom holds that Millennials are too young and broke to be shopping for life insurance, but Jeffrey Fleischman wants to teach hipsters that insurance can do more than provide for survivors.
Conventional wisdom holds that Millennials are too young and broke to be shopping for life insurance, but Jeffrey Fleischman wants to teach hipsters that insurance can do more than provide for survivors.
“Our job is to convey that life insurance is important from the context of financial fitness,” said the chief marketing and digital officer of Penn Mutual Life Insurance Co. Millennials are savers, and Penn Mutual is focused on showing them insurance can also help pay for education, medical expenses, and more, he said.
Fleischman was hired in 2015, charged with giving the 169-year-old insurer a Millennial-friendly digital facelift. He spoke to CMO.com about that effort, why the company’s chose rugby as its first sports sponsorship, and overall thoughts about transforming life insurance marketing.
CMO.com: When you joined, Penn Mutual was halfway through a 10-year plan. What was the plan and where it is now?
We created a plan that continues today, which is a commitment to insurance across the client’s life, given the value we place on life insurance and what it means to your financial health. We also have a commitment to advisers, through our Advisor Value Commitment.
The third [plan point] was delivering to our stakeholders. We’re a mutual company and our policyholders are our owners. The fourth is providing personalized experiences to our advisers and clients. [The fifth is] working together in a values-driven and relationship-based culture. We are a company that has been around 169 years. We have a very rich culture.
Based on that list, we have largely achieved those objectives well ahead of 2020. Now we’re focused on what the next step is: What is the next five- to 10-year push for our strategy?
CMO.com: Part of your brief was to transform Penn Mutual’s digital presence. Why?
Fleischman: The expectations and needs of our advisers and customers continue to change, especially in the digital world, so our focus and strategy is based on four areas: brand engagement, lead generation, digital journeys, and recruitment.
A big change is upgrading our platform so we can build a scalable digital experience and responsive design. No matter what device you come to us on, the experience will be consistent with that device.
The other area I’ve been focused on, and the company has made great strides in, is social media. As you can imagine, the insurance industry has been a laggard in this space, partly due to regulatory issues. The amount of advisers using social media has grown by 48% in 2016 compared to 2015. That’s partly because we have created a considerable amount of content. Engagement and average engagement per post are both growing at pretty good rates. Our engagement rates are growing 30%, but our average engagement per posting is up over 40%.
I think we have created a lot of high-quality content. There’s a lot of focus on—and a lot of our new content is—video and motion graphics, because we know that drives engagement, especially among Millennials.
Lastly, we’re digitizing our content. Our annual report is digital, some of our core publications are online-only, and they are interactive. We embed all sorts of things and links, so that we have content that you can really get more out of [rather] than just reading an article.
CMO.com: Millennials are all about transparency and sharing. Does that clash with financial services’ tendency to opacity?
Fleischman: We live in a new world. I don’t know where the trigger point happened, but people expect transparency. If you’re not transparent and genuine, consumers will not want to deal with you.
In general, there is a degree of difficulty in understanding aspects of financial products. It might be partly due to regulatory reasons, in what we can and cannot say, but it’s imperative for us to be transparent, or at least do the best we can to be transparent about our products.
We’ve worked with Drexel University and ideation groups like MindSumo, which is a college-based ideation challenge web experience, where you push out challenges and have college kids respond. We’ve used both to understand how we should be engaging Millennials.
CMO.com: What have you learned?
Fleischman: We’ve learned a couple of things. They want easy experiences. Millennials and Gen Z are very used to being able to go on a phone, click on a couple of things, and whatever it is, they get it—whether it be a purchase or information.
We also found they have a strong affinity for mutual companies. We did a survey with Drexel on Millennials, and they didn’t know what a mutual company stood for. Once they found out that a mutual company is owned by its policyholders, there was an immediate affinity. There is a bit of distrust around publicly traded companies, especially due to the fact that they support their shareholders first and customers second. That was a big eye-opener for us. Communicating what a mutual company is is going to become important.
We also learned that Millennials are focused on savings and that financial health is really important because they saw their parents live through the economic downturn in ’08/’09. They save money and are very open to investing and putting money on vehicles that can actually help their financial security.
Listening is key to what we’re about, and it’s one of the reasons we’re making progress. Some of the output that has been created is directly reflecting the things we’re hearing. Millennials are not different from Baby Boomers, but their expectations and their use of technology is probably more pronounced.
CMO.com: Why did Penn Mutual choose rugby for its first sports sponsorship? Will you renew when the deal expires?
Fleischman: Not only are we thrilled with our relationship with NBC and United World Sports, we’ve already extended our program to 2019. It has been fantastic.
We chose rugby for a couple of reasons. It’s a great platform to reach Millennials. It’s the fastest-growing team sport in the U.S. It returned to the Olympics last year, although our USA teams didn’t do great.
We saw rugby as a great opportunity to attract young people into the business, increase brand reach, and increase brand awareness. We were not a consumer-facing brand, not widely well-known to consumers, so that was a key goal. Recruitment, bringing new people and Millennials into the insurance business, was goal No. 2, and No. 3 was lead generation—creating new business.
In terms of results, I want to put this in perspective: This was a company that wasn’t known to consumers, and in the past year we had over 550 million impressions. About half of it is earned media. That has been a huge plus for us.
CMO.com: Penn Mutual’s CEO, Eileen McDonnell, is the former CMO. Does that help or hold you to a tougher standard?
Fleischman: Eileen is an extremely knowledgeable marketer but is also a very knowledgeable business leader, and she’s really focused on driving the business forward.
Marketing has to build a compelling case for what we do, how we do it, and what outcomes we can expect from them. I have Eileen’s complete support, [but her] having a marketing background also means I need to cross my t’s and dot my i’s and make sure that I go in with my facts straight because there is little that she doesn’t know about what I do. That does keep me very sharp.
CMO.com: What can we expect from Penn Mutual in coming months?
Fleischman: We’re going to start with a series of website changes. Our home page will be refreshed, followed quickly by a complete redo of the site in navigation and embedding into the site a lot of advanced capability in terms of personalization. Internally, we have our adviser site, in which they come and get information about their business and around our content. That has been completely redone, and we are going to launch that in the next month or two.
We’re really hitting our stride in terms of producing the right kind of content to engage our audiences, and we are going to continue to innovate. You’ll see a lot more integration of visual processes into what we do. It won’t be either/or; it will be more of an omnichannel experience where consumers and our advisers can interact with us when they want, where they want. That kind of paradigm will go a long way to achieving the results we’re focused on.
The results today have proved that we have the right formula. What you’ll see in the future—what you can expect—is more of that.