Liberty Mutual: 2011 FCS Financial Marketer of the Year

On January 26, we welcomed a sell-out crowd of more than 200 guests to our 6th Annual FCS Financial Marketer of the Year Award Gala luncheon at the New York Yacht Club. The recipient of the 2011 honor, first announced at this year’s FCS Race for Kids, was Liberty Mutual Insurance. The luncheon’s guest of honor, representing Liberty Mutual, was Paul Alexander, SVP, Communications. He was joined by his wife Evelyne and their college-age children David and Faye. The luncheon was sponsored by CNBC, and the opening reception was sponsored by The Wall Street Journal. The keynote speaker at the luncheon was CNBC’s Bill Griffeth, co-anchor of “Closing Bell.”
As noted by Chris Bacon, an FCS Board Director and one of the co-chairs of the Award Committee, “The Award recognizes a financial services firm whose marketing has driven outstanding business results over the prior year. Liberty Mutual Insurance was recognized for The Responsibility Project, its online content platform, which has more than 700 original videos, essays, and blogs, all exploring what it means to ‘do the right thing.’”

In accepting the Financial Marketer of the Year Award, Paul Alexander gave a 30 minute presentation detailing his firm’s strategy for improving its place in the highly competitive insurance landscape, which ultimately led to the creation of The Responsibility Project. Alexander revealed to the audience that a fundamental marketing truth in the insurance category was that higher unaided awareness leads to higher quote activity which in turn leads to higher business growth. So a fundamental goal would be to increase awareness. Yet, Alexander admitted that a great challenge in the category is that consumers generally don’t want to discuss insurance. At Liberty Mutual, the decision was made that “being invited in beats being locked out,” so the firm sought to leverage the equation of “the media we buy plus the media we create would equal the media we would earn.”

With an ad spend of only $86 million in 2010 – just a little more than one-tenth of GEICO’s $775 million spend – Liberty Mutual realized that the media they created would need to have an exponential impact in order to change its position in the marketplace.

Alexander explained the research undertaken by Liberty Mutual’s agency Hill Holliday. They reviewed the learnings from an examination of the insurance category: the commoditized industry was cluttered with competitors who all outspent Liberty Mutual in marketing dollars, but all failed to earn the trust of their customers. Hill Holliday analyzed the communications styles within the industry, which seemed to be either “adult to child” (condescending) or even “child to child” (think: cavemen and lizards) in nature. They saw this as the opportunity to create a marketing approach that was uniquely “adult to adult.”

The result was the development of Responsibility as the core of Liberty Mutual’s strategy. From its tagline: “Responsibility. What’s your policy?” to its major outreach initiative, The Responsibility Project, Liberty Mutual embraced the concept as its key differentiator in the marketplace. But as Alexander explained, it became more: “Responsibility is celebrating our customers’ responsibility and relentlessly proving our own.’

Alexander provided the FCS audience with clips of the firm’s TV commercials and various anecdotes of the campaign’s success. He also spoke in detail about the many activations of The Responsibility Project – from the web site and its social media components, to its involvement with the Emmy Award-winning documentary “Freedom Riders.” Alexander noted several key points about the Responsibility Project’s role in building business:
1.  It improves brand awareness by keeping Liberty Mutual top of mind when 67% of ‘out-of-market’ consumers don’t want to talk about insurance, and

2.  It strengthens brand engagement by creating an online presence where consumers choose to spend their time
Alexander noted that, as of January 17, the Responsibility Project’s web site had nearly 26 million site visits, with visitors spending more than 130 million minutes engaged with the Liberty Mutual brand.

Congratulations to Paul Alexander, his marketing team, their partners at Hill Holliday, and to Liberty Mutual for the success of its Responsibility Project and for winning the 2011 FCS Financial Marketer of the Year Award.