“The hard thing about hard things is you have to look them in the eye and be fearless, and not afraid to fail,” says Michelle Klein.

It’s a mantra IAG’s first chief customer and marketing officer has lived her career by. Prior to joining IAG and while at Meta, she launched a $200m global grants program for 40,000 businesses during the pandemic; before it was expected, before others moved. “Marketing didn’t just tell the story, it led the action and sparked some of the most positive sentiment the company had seen in years,” recalls Klein.

In her first two years at the ASX-listed insurance giant, she ran two major efforts simultaneously, repositioning to A Help Company and becoming a broadcast partner of the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games for the first time, in just four months with an immovable deadline.

“It was a purposeful sprint, high stakes and real disruption in action, energising the team, galvanising the business, and resetting how people – inside and out – saw us. As A Help Company,” Klein says.

Effective marketing strategy

The North Star of evolving NRMA Insurance from an Insurance ‘Brand’ to a ‘A Help Company’ (AHC) started coming to life ahead of a major milestone for NRMA Insurance: Its Centenary.

“For this momentous occasion, the business needed a transformative idea to set the tone for the next 100 years. It was about highlighting the strength and distinctiveness of NRMA’s services today, while providing an uplifting vision for the customer experience, marketing, product and employee engagement of tomorrow,” Klein says.

The deceptively simple elevation of the brand’s promise of ‘help’ has begun pervading the entire company’s identity and kickstarted a company-wide transformation. As Klein makes clear, AHC is far bigger than an ‘advertising idea’; it acts as a galvanising lens for the business to reinvent everything from CX, NPD, portfolio diversification, staff engagement, partnerships and more.

Initiatives already spurred by the all-encompassing positioning include using NRMA's scale to provide proactive extreme weather warning by location, trialling DroneAssist roof inspections to give homeowners better information about how they maintain their homes, expanding wear and tear tips through HomeHealth Check, providing empathy training to frontline staff, and enabling consumers to track their claims in real time. It’s equally spurred action to fix one of Queensland's most notoriously dangerous highways, and seen NRMA strike fresh third-party partnerships both in the community as well as to support its digital offering. 

“I know vision alone is not enough. Throughout my career, I have been on a mission to quantifiably prove that marketing drives growth to boards and c-suites,” Klein comments.

Already, one in two new customers cite 'A Help Company' as a factor for joining NRMA. It’s also helped deliver double-digit new business volumes. According to Brand Finance data, NRMA secured a +1-percentage point improvement in total brand value, cracking the $2bn mark for the first time to cement its position as the #1 insurance brand in Australia and three globally.

Fuelling change further is Klein’s belief customer experience is not only a lever for marketing, but the core ingredient. When she became IAG’s inaugural chief customer and marketing officer, she helped shape this remit, bringing together previously disparate divisions under a united customer experience and marketing team (CXM). This meant building entirely new operational processes, strategies and ways of working.

A tangible example is ‘Start Up’ Structure, which embraces learnings from Klein’s time leading major global tech companies in Silicon Valley to reimagine operations of her newly formed team. Streamlining operational rhythms and embracing a fail-fast mindset ensures the new model is constantly tested, iterated and scaled when proven, she says. This has already enabled greater agility in the go-to-market flow, halving the average speed to market.

Another early project for the CXM was customer experience mapping, involving a deep dive on existing customer journey, analysing opportunities for the brand to provide a more helpful experience. This resulted in a series of new experiences launched in line with the new brand platform like Policy Snapshot for information about customer coverage, and the drone technology trial.

To support the new-look team and to ensure agency partnerships were capable of delivering deliver integrated business transformation, Klein hired Accenture Song as a pioneering global/local end-to-end marketing and CX ecosystem partner. As reported previously by Mi3, this partnership unifies multidisciplinary talents across Accenture’s global network (tech, creative, CX, commerce and measurement) to deliver growth initiatives and outcomes.

Discerning decision making

On the marketing execution front, meanwhile, NRMA Insurance became an official broadcast partner of the Paris Olympic Games. “This was a highly visible partnership, with a highly intentional strategic purpose; to rapidly build national awareness and affinity for the brand’s new 'AHC' vision,” says Klein. “In hindsight, especially with the stellar results, it may seem like an easy and obvious strategy. However, making it happen in the timeframe it was delivered was an astonishing feat.”

To get there, Klein built a business case to switch strategies away from the traditional marketing effectiveness playbook to one of calculated cultural activation.

“Knowing brands are built in the collective conscience, and there are very few remaining platforms that drive national collective engagement, I galvanised the board, executive leaders and the entire company behind the opportunity to redirect investment to make it happen, all in a matter of months,” she says.

Simultaneously, Klein co-ordinated her new team, agency partner and the entire business to deliver the completely new brand platform, business and customer experience refresh against an immovable deadline of under six months. The commitment paid off, accelerating impact on all key brand metrics, especially in new markets. As Klein puts it, the result was the equivalent of two years of marketing impact.

Business influence

In terms of shaping the broader business agenda, AHC has already informed a major CX overhaul aligned to a broader digital migration strategy, personalising the customer experience more than ever before. It’s equally birthed new solutions, such as amplifying digitised claim tracking and scaling product propositions such as multi-policy discounts, as well as business expansion into categories beyond insurance.

Community partnerships with help-minded partners have been another priority. NRMA has now partnered with Cricket Australia, Surfing Australia, Adelaide Fringe Festival and Thriving Communities ‘One Stop One Story’ to support vulnerable customers.

Another milestone Klein points to is its education platform, Help Nation, in partnership with the Australian Red Cross, to help Australians be better prepared for extreme weather. To date, more than 700,000 customers have been reached and 3000 trained in-person.

Data-driven decision making

Then there’s the proactive media-led, data informed work to make Queensland's most notorious highway, the Bruce Highway, safer. The ambition NRMA Insurance set out to address was a uniquely Queensland problem to prove the power of help, continues Klein.  

Reviewing customer surveys, claims data and cultural listening, they identified the biggest pain point: the notorious Bruce Highway. Listed among the world’s 25 worst roads, the Bruce Highway has a crash rate three-to-five times higher than major highways.

To help fix it, NRMA Insurance partnered with News Corp to launch ‘Help Our Highway’ – a statewide advocacy program making the Bruce Highway a government priority. The campaign launched on April 17, 2024, with a massive statewide editorial blitz, featuring coordinated front-page stories across all Queensland mastheads. “Supported by NRMA Insurance claims data, consumer insights, creative advertising and localised editorial, this blitz set the news agenda, generating national television, talkback and social coverage beyond the NewsCorp ecosystem,” says Klein.

 ‘Help Our Highway’ delivered 68.2 million media impressions and real impact. Within two weeks, the Federal Government committed to Australia’s first National Road Safety Data Hub and a $21 million investment. It’s a milestone that's taken more than a decade to land. By May, $467m was pledged in the federal budget, with an additional $7.2bn committed over five years to enhance safety and capacity on the Bruce.

“This proved to Queenslanders that NRMA Insurance isn’t just an insurer, it’s A Help Company. All this resulted in direct brand uplifts,” says Klein.

Commercial delivery

Collectively, these results drove short-term growth, but also long-term equity. The NRMA Insurance brand’s value, according to Brand Finance  data, is up +1% YoY to over $2bn, the only brand in category whose value has grown.

“Proudly, all the above were achieved despite growth headwinds – navigating a cost-of-living crisis as a premium brand, increasing competitor marketing activity 10 per cent YoY, and overall insurance category challenges in such a climate,” Klein says.

People leadership

For Klein, the other reward is the extent 'What would A Help Company do?' has become a simple but galvanising statement transforming how NRMA Insurance operates and develops its people.

“It opens talent to rethink every element of the business, from customer experience to new product features, to more adaptive development and cross-functional business contribution, leveraging lean start up principles and a growth mindset,” she says. “A Help Company builds a workforce of professional empaths, people who have understanding not just as a personality trait but a skill.”

Helping this along are hands-on training programs such as community immersion to provide education, valuable training, customer stories, call listening and daily reviews of the voice of the customer. CXM Connect is a monthly meetup built to surface and solve business challenges through multi-disciplinary skillsets. Instead of siloed projects, CXM connect unites service, marketing, UX, complaints, social impact teams and more around integrated customer experience workstreams.

In addition, on the last Wednesday of every month, the CXM team come together to hear from external leaders about case studies, solutions and cutting-edge innovations outside the business and category that enhance the customer experience. Across IAG, Klein also introduced a new company-wide program called Circles, whereby she meets with a wide range of employees on a quarterly basis to discuss challenging topics in a psychologically safe environment , such as advice for women in leadership during International Women’s Day, or how to prioritise via the Eisenhower Matrix.

“An attribute I expect modern marketers to have is range,” concludes Klein. “The ability to turn insight into impact, to move seamlessly from customer truths to commercial outcomes, to know which levers drive growth, and translate creativity into numbers the CFO respects. The best marketers are builders: Curious, commercially sharp, brave enough to challenge, collaborative enough to bring others with them, and committed to growing themselves and the business.”