It took Youi’s CMO, Angela Greenwood, a full year after joining the insurer to release any new creative work. Why? Because it was critical she first got the lay of the land, then built her brand and strategic foundations on solid ground. Challenger brand notwithstanding, it was a program of work that also saw her transform her team.

“It was tough to resist the temptation, but it ensured that once we were ready to take new work to market, we exploded out of the blocks,” says the marketing chief.

Nielsen data shows Youi has entered Australia’s Top 20 advertisers for the first time in 2024. This position is a clear demonstration of marketing’s strong contribution to Youi’s growth.

Vision is an attribute Greenwood expects modern marketers to have if they’re to make such gains. “I believe marketers play a strong role in orientating their businesses confidently into the future and our vision is powerful when it’s woven seamlessly into the overall business strategy,” she says.

Effective marketing strategy

The North Star for Greenwood has been reigniting Youi’s incredible challenger brand and spirit. FY23, the first year in her efforts as CMO, she put the emphasis on building strong foundations to address the dual challenges of slowing business growth and low team engagement. Key initiatives included a team restructure, an evolved hybrid approach to augment what was a fully in-house agency model with expert partners, and a comprehensive deep dive to inform a “crisp articulation” of Youi’s future brand strategy.

At Greenwood and her team’s disposal were several powerful distinct brand assets – notably, ‘you.insured’ – and brand differentiation. “My goal therefore wasn’t reinvention, rather amplification of existing strengths,” she says.

“This foundational work was supplemented by rapid-fire optimisation of top performing channels and creative to reinvigorate growth while forming the future battle plan.”

Armed with the right talent and insights to drive forward, in FY24 Greenwood felt marketing was ready to refresh the brand and how Youi presented to Australians. In October 2023, marketing released the first wave of bold work grounded in that challenger spirit. Key creative ingredients introduced include the ‘Insurance that’s a bit more you-shaped’ moniker, “a compelling expression of our customer-first approach”,  comments Greenwood. “Backed by a substantial media buy, it was a game changer for our business trajectory.”

FY25 meant scaling up further with greater impact and campaign velocity than ever before. “We’ve translated growing brand preference into switching with the launch of ‘You haven’t shopped around until you’ve tried Youi’,” she says.

According to Greenwood, such great creative has deep insights at its core. As a result, she’s not convinced that marketers have to choose between data or creative first. “But if I had to choose, my heart says creative first because I’ve seen time and again that a powerful idea will far outperform something that’s been optimised within an inch of its life,” she comments.

Getting her ducks in order also meant turbo-charging operational efficiencies and removing a mature in-house team’s bottlenecks. Greenwood began by transitioning to a hybrid model that seamlessly integrates internal expertise with selective agency partnerships.

“This gives us the right firepower to both enhance our thinking and scale production during peak periods,” she explains. “In the transition, I was determined to stay true to a core Youi principle followed for 15 years: Keeping all strategic activity in the hands of our internal teams and resisting the well-trodden path of outsourcing ‘big brand’ work to externals.”

Very focused recruitment was required, made that bit harder by Youi’s HQ location on the Sunshine Coast. But with strongly pedigreed new hires in the roles of Creative Director, Head of Creative & Production and Head of Media all coming on-board in 2023, Greenwood knew the team could not only continue, but enhance the legacy.

Another cornerstone of operational transformation was implementing project management platform, Wrike. A dedicated multidisciplinary working group then mapped new campaign processes, introducing refined workflows, and conducted three rounds of in-depth training. As a result, 100% of team members adopted the platform within six months, exceeding an already ambitious benchmark. It’s a change that’s enable 32 per cent more creative asserts to be created in 2024 versus 2023, and saved hundreds of hours per month – the equivalent of 1.8 full time resources.

“Our refined operating model has been critical to our rapid execution in market and impressive growth trajectory – no small feat for a passionate Sunny Coast crew,” adds Greenwood.

Discerning decision making

Sponsorship has become another improved string to the brand bow, as Greenwood turned her attention to giving more meaning to Youi’s NRL and AFL partnerships as 'The Official Partner of Footy Fans’.

Since 2017, Youi has been the ‘Official Insurance Partner’ of the NRL, and in 2020 commenced a Brisbane Lions partnership. Despite this, brand recognition remained low, with fewer than one in 10 knowing of the NRL partnership after seven years.

“We hypothesised that creating greater meaning with footy fans via an integrated creative platform would drive customer growth from these audiences. But this was unproven and required a leap of faith,” continues Greenwood.

So she carved off a cross-functional team to run at the challenge and diverted media funding to boost exposure and impact in hero footy moments. ‘Footy. Made by Fans.’ was born and came to life in the 2024 season across everything from bespoke TVCs to community fundraising. In a first for both Youi and Australia, Greenwood’s team backed a hero PR moment when it handed over Brisbane Lions sponsorship to a superfan, Scott Villiers.

One in three NRL fans now associate Youi with their code, while the Lions partnership generated a +14 per cent increase year-on-year in QI Media Value. NRL and Lions fans are also more likely to become Youi customers vs national benchmarks.

Business influence

Youi’s CEO calls insurance a team sport and Greenwood is in no doubt he’s right. Following several years of business growth in which marketing has played a strong role, she’s now part of a working group alongside a handful of c-suite colleagues to shape Youi’s strategy for FY26 and beyond. Strong collaboration ensures marketing activity is aligned to product profitability targets, Youi’s underwriting approach and frontline capabilities.

“This reflects the ‘seat at the table’ that marketing has well and truly earned, and the expectation that our function is seamlessly integrated into the broader organisation,” she says.

Such involvement in the business beyond marketing has since seen Greenwood participate in an insurance simulation, requiring detailed decision making across every business value driver from product portfolios to capital management.

In addition, she’s proactively led programs of Youi-wide uplift, including a ‘Customer Love’ initiative aimed at uniting every area of business in the mission to deliver seamless and brand aligned customer experience. This resulted in the launch of Youi’s Cultural Credo, which captures the spirit of Youi's culture, how it underpins strategy, and supports execution.

Data-driven decision making

As a data-led business, marketing has equally followed suit, partnering with Youi’s actuarial function to build bespoke internal metrics which ensure confidence in marketing’s ongoing business growth contribution. This was bolstered by becoming an early adopter of Mutinex in February 2023.

“This has given us maturity in media modelling and armed us with business cases to push harder in channels where we’re far from diminishing returns,” says Greenwood.

For instance, campaign-level insights show the broadcast ROI of ‘You haven’t shopped around until you’ve tried Youi’ has outperformed previous top performing CTA-focused campaign by healthy triple digits. This campaign’s success also sprang from robust insights at the core of how it was developed, with Roy Morgan Single Source data and Kantar brand tracking showing shopping behaviour on the rise in the category due to cost-of-living pressures, alongside increasing preference for challenger brands.

“By tapping simply and directly into a growing consumer behaviour and claiming the idea of ‘shopping around’ for insurance in consumers’ minds, we’re driving more consumers to put us on their shopping list,” says Greenwood.

Commercial delivery

Driving profitable growth has to be a core goal for marketing leaders and Greenwood is no different. Youi’s brand health tracking showed a 9.5 per cent year-on-year increase in brand preference at the close of 2024, translating into strong lead generation. This has resulted in impressive growth across both new customer acquisition and additional sales staff hired to service the demand.

Mutinex econometric modelling also shows a 91.5 per cent increase in Marketing ROI in 2024 vs 2023, measured via customer lifetime value of policies acquired. As has been reported in Mi3 previously, the Mutinex platform has played a solid role in proving the effectiveness of the strategy at an executive level.

Search data also shows Youi’s brand interest grew more than 3x faster than the industry average during 2024. And Roy Morgan’s view of the car insurance market showed Youi achieving the second highest position in the industry for net growth in 2024.

People leadership

Greenwood sums up her CMO style in three words: Focused, courageous, caring.

“At Youi, company culture and values sit at the heart of everything we do, and our culture is built on our people-first approach,” she says. The marketing team is a beacon for high performance and engagement at Youi, achieving the equal highest department score in the 2024 annual Values Survey of 8.6/10.

“One of our core values is Human, and we live by it. Our team is actively involved in supporting our community through volunteering and support for worthy causes.”

Training’s not a luxury in the team either. Everyone receives dedicated annual training budget, alongside Youi’s organisation-wide programs that accelerate promising performers into the leaders of tomorrow. All people leaders receive annual 360-degree feedback and scoring for continuous growth too. Last year, Greenwood was up in the top echelons for building relationships, leading others, managing self, strategic thinking, task management and values alignment.

Recognition is also key to Youi’s team culture and everything from spot prizes, weekly #RecognitionWednesday Teams chat to Yearly Marketing Stars Awards and a company-wide Gala Dinner are leveraged to deliver it.