Marketing Is Not Just One Discipline Anymore

BALTIMORE -- Marketing historically filled its role within insurance companies with little interference or collaboration.

But today's marketing campaigns should be coordinated across multiple departments and disciplines, said Sean F. O'Donnell, vice president of member relations and consulting for LIMRA.

O'Donnell was scheduled to deliver the closing session today at the 2018 LIMRA Marketing Conference. The title is appropriate: "Continuing the Journey: The Evolution and Elevation of Marketing."

“How do you continue with that conversation once you get back to the office, but also how can you continue to talk about that journey that marketing itself has been on?" he asked. "My point of view on this is that marketing needs to continue to evolve and it needs to elevate. It needs to go from a department to a discipline that is pervasive across the enterprise."

LIMRA studies have found that the insurance market is more fragmented than ever, O'Donnell said, and the consumer is more elusive than ever. Likewise, needs are more complex and technology is more pervasive.

In short, it's like taking a baseball team and making them play on a soccer field. The players need to ramp up the teamwork to make the game a success.

"As society changes, as the economy itself changes, so too, must your understanding of marketing and how it applies, that also has to change," O'Donnell explained. "You build a better mousetrap and market will come, but then everyone copies that mousetrap, so you have to start to differentiate."

No longer can customers be defined in very broad terms. Often, insurers will want to market to millennials, for example, or the mass affluent, and could reliably depend on a specific demographic profile to guide them, O'Donnell said.

That doesn't work very well today. LIMRA is perpetually studying "who buys what and why," he added, in an effort to produce the best data possible.

"It just highlights the need for us to really understand how marketing works in concert with sales," O'Donnell said. "When you look at the traditional marketing and sales funnel, marketing itself is involved in far more layers of the funnel than it historically has been.

"And what that means is that more disciplines are involved. And most likely, it’s more disciplines than any one individual can master."

InsuranceNewsNet Senior Editor John Hilton has covered business and other beats in more than 20 years of daily journalism. John may be reached at [email protected].

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