What you need to know:

• Four-and-a-half months after IAG brought in Accenture Song as its one-stop agency for everything from creative and brand work to digital, CX and transformation, the wrappers are off the first work: NRMA’s new trademarked brand positioning, A Help Company.
• The fresh visual identity, digital and brand work arrives just in time for NRMA’s first ever national broadcast partnership with Nine across the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Paris 2024.
• But according to IAG chief customer and marketing officer, Michelle Klein, the starting mark was experience and customer insights NRMA could action, not creative execution.
• For creative lead David Droga, the work is about demonstrating the “power of a simple but deeply relevant idea”, he says. “In a category that can feel complicated, NRMA Insurance is providing a customer experience that honours the heritage of its brand and makes things simpler for its customers."
• That practical simplicity will see NRMA emphasising some of the core value-added benefits of its products and services to customers, Klein says, and is also triggering more investment into tech-driven experience use cases, community education programs and initiatives.
• For Klein, this kind of pragmatic approach is needed to achieve signal in a market full of noise and challenging macroeconomic forces. Per Klein: “We’re in a world that’s so busy and complicated, and there's a lot of anxiety. Companies, brands and businesses that can tell a simple story to people is the way forward right now.”

A little over four months after beefing up its one-operation marketing, customer experience, comms, regulatory and transformation functional approach with a new-styled, end-to-end partnership with Accenture Song, NRMA’s newly minted brand platform ‘A Help Company’ has made its debut.

The fresh positioning, visual identity, digital and brand work lands just in time for NRMA’s first-ever national broadcast partnership with Nine across the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Paris 2024. Just don’t think of it as an advertising-first game plan. IAG chief customer and marketing officer, Michelle Klein, says the starting mark was experience and customer insights over creative execution.

Formally, IAG’s ambition is to action and scale NRMA’s longstanding promise of help into a whole-of-company platform, putting it at the centre of every experience, touchpoint – and yes, marketing activity – it engages in. Anecdotally, it meant Klein didn't see a TVC draft for a really long time. Well, a long time given gestation to external launch was only March to July.

“When we first saw this positioning as A Help Company, it felt big and different yet totally linked to where we've been. Consumers understand it and it taps into our values, history and heritage. But we didn't see a TV script for a really long time… well, quite late given the four-and-a-half month,” Klein tells Mi3.

“The presentation and ideation process with the Accenture team started with experiences: What would A Help Company do? That's a galvanising proposition not just for us to think through what we do for our customers, but what you do every day as a staff member when you turn on your computer, pick up the phone, or deal with a vulnerable customer.”

It's this internal business element Klein is clearly excited about: How the brand platform influences IAG’s culture.

“That’s the beauty and essence of this proposition,” she says. “You can make an ad and put an ad on TV and everyone can feel proud of that when they see it. But to create something that resonates with you as you come to work every day is exciting. We are going to look at the employee experience as a result, along with how that then influences other changes of business transformation we could make.

“That's the sort of response we're getting both internally but also externally because we've really vetted this with customers and non-customers.”

The one-stop agency/digital/CX shop

Helping IAG realise this ambition is one-stop agency partner, Accenture Song, which brought together specialists from across the business, locally and globally, including David Droga, Nick Law and ANZ lead, Mark Green, to tackle the task. For Accenture Song, the partnership is about demonstrating breadth of capability, from traditional creative and brand to digital transformation and customer experience, synchronising efforts to deliver everything end to end.

There’s still plenty of advertising bling to go with it. The marketing manifestation of the new ‘A Help Company’ positioning includes a hero TVC featuring a cover of the Beatles classic tune, Help! by Australian brand, The Murlocs. It will also be realised across outdoor, audio, digital and print, kicking off from 27 July and the Paris Olympics opening ceremony. The creative premise anchors in one question: What would A Help Company do?

Meanwhile, efforts to action how NRMA delivers on this promise of help extend through to a microsite re-engineered to highlight existing and new experiences customers can take advantage of as customers, to net new experiences such as a one-page Policy Snapshot, something Klein positions as “different in the category of insurance”.

Additionally, new technology use cases are in the wings. Drone technology is being trialled to help customers identify potential issues with their rooftops and as a way of ensuring customers who shouldn’t be climbing ladders avoid potential falls and accidents.

Klein says there never could have been any other option in terms of positioning for NRMA but help.

“Help is such a solid proposition. I always have this visual in my mind of a warm hug or helping somebody to cross the road, holding someone's hand. That is who we have been for 99 years and building on that was so important,” she comments. “The question was how you keep refreshing this, making it relevant and more meaningful in people's lives. That's what this is all about. There are beautiful stories from the last century of our history in terms of demonstrations of help. We have influenced government change, societal change and made people feel safer – we’ve helped make roads and children safer. How to take that into the next century is what we wanted to do.”

For David Droga, the work is about demonstrating the “power of a simple but deeply relevant idea”.

“In a category that can feel complicated, NRMA Insurance is providing a customer experience that honours the heritage of its brand and makes things simpler for its customers,” he says. “This is the kind of creative and tech-powered solution Accenture Song was built to deliver for our clients.”

Local chief Mark Green added help is a very “human” thing and for NRMA, something that’s more than just goodwill. “It’s a promise made to all Australians,” he says.

Rating IAG’s new agency ecosystem

The fact this brand proposition has come to market so quickly is an illustration of how “fast and exciting” the ride has been so far for Klein and her team since announcing the partnership with Accenture Song.

“Working closely with David Droga, Nick Law and Neil Heymann, then the Australian team led by Mark Green and some wonderful creatives over here has been a really interesting, ‘glocal’ way of working to get the best of the thinking and ideas,” she says. “There’s the team in the US who are Australian and have grown up with our brand; plus the network effect of Accenture Song – some of the visual identity and design work has come through parts of that ecosystem. Digital components have again, come through some of the skills they have that could augment what we were doing here. Then there’s the Australian team.

“I'm going to use the word agile, as this is truly agile. When you're dealing with New York hours, California hours, Sydney hours, then you can wake up next morning and there's an iteration on the feedback you provided, makes it a wonderful partnership. I know my team feel really energised.”

As marketing and customer chief at IAG, it’s personally been a shift for Klein in how she’s operated historically too.

“At first when we announced this four months ago, with the bigness of all the components it was a little bit like, oh. But the team has just leaned in,” she continues. “The pace is good because it creates excitement, momentum and you take people with you on that journey. They can see themselves in it and they can see the opportunity for the customer. That's really what's galvanised us to move fast and make something bigger than marketing happen here for our company.”

As a case in point, Klein points to working with internal tech teams to get the digital infrastructure up and running “in a timeframe we’re perhaps not used to”.

“It’s been about figuring out how you take some of the complicated stuff and make it simpler, working through different parts of the organisation to deliver that.”

Why it’s time for practical marketing

Grounding the brand effort in the experience layer indicates the practical, business lens being put across everything. For Klein, the macro-economic climate has made it critical brands better articulate the value-added benefits of what they offer to customers to achieve an optimum “signal to noise” ratio.   

“The world is so busy and complicated, and there's a lot of anxiety. Companies, brands and businesses that can tell a simple story to people is the way forward right now,” she says.

“We did a lot of testing – I’m a big believer in checking in with customers and non-customers throughout the process of building something. What we started to learn was those basics of understanding the coverage were key. We’ve made ads about what some might think are the basics of your insurance policy. For example, if someone else is driving your car, you're covered. Or something we might do as humans on a busy day is forget to lock the front door. Well, you're covered. There are more of those we learnt through that fairly rigorous process of testing that people want to hear and know about.”

Then take the policy snapshot, or drone trial. “We don't want people climbing up on a ladder if they're vulnerable, we want to be able to support you with that. So we’re going to understand with our customers if that is a value-add,” Klein says. “We're excited to launch these experiences and build more as we go.”

According to Klein, such examples highlight NRMA’s emphasis on “the partnership between me the customer and you the business”.

“When we tested as recently as last week again to understand what's the takeaway, we heard both things,” she continues. “We heard the [A Help Company] idea delivers the sentiment of us as an iconic insurer. An actual quote from one participant is that ‘this is compassionate. It's the whole thing, you can't say they haven't thought of everything’.

“It's striking a really good balance both rational and emotional; that's the beauty of the idea.”

Being marketer + customer chief

What’s also driven this different approach is the fact Klein is both marketing and customer chief. It was a role envisaged by IAG’s CEO, Julie Batch, who describes the new brand work as a “bold declaration for how NRMA plans to continue to deliver for customers”.

"When you look back on the advertising that has been made around this brand, it's truly remarkable, world renowned and beautifully done. This role is now about customer experience and marketing. I have a complaints team and I have a marketing team,” Klein says. “What we're trying to do here is understand what is surfacing perhaps in complaints, then take that insight and address it through strategy, then make sure we're communicating it. That's really the change and the opportunity.”

How NRMA shows up in communities is another string to this bow. There’s a big focus on making sure people are prepared for extreme weather through investments into education. Another community-led initiative is the partnership with fixing the Bruce Highway in Queensland.

“It’s about acting as well as communicating, but firstly, really finding real insight. That's what's been so interesting for me in this role,” Klein says. “You can do a lot of testing and ask a lot of questions, but you can also go and talk to customers, understand their issues and frustrations and address those. We have the tools here now to address these. It might be as simple as the policy snapshot:  Can I just understand it this way? And is it something I can download and read? That may not feel the most technically, breakthrough approach, but it's valuable to customers.”

When it comes to gauging effectiveness of the rejuvenated brand work, short and longer term are similarly well-rounded and through the funnel.

“We've been around for 99 years, going into 100, and we have a lot of loyal customers. We're the most trusted Insurance brand in Australia and one of the fastest growing in the world. We need to really focus on understanding we're maintaining that leadership position. Really thinking about the brand metrics and brand love around that,” Klein says.  

“We want to reinvent the experience, so we will look at the CX and NPS metrics. There's a lot in there because that's a new area for all companies – thinking about how you measure customer experience. We're partnering to understand customer outcomes as that's a big component of our measurement strategy. Lastly, because we're 100 years old, we want to make sure we continue to be relevant.”