Insurance & Technology: Cognizant Business Consulting Experts Write About Changing the Culture in Insurance Marketing to Reflect a Data Analytics Approach

“It’s one thing to talk about creating a marketing analytics foundation and turning data into insights, another to use those insights to make business decisions. But doing so is potentially a game changer,” write Michael Kim, Vice President of Insurance Consulting, and Agil Francis, Senior Manager of Insurance Consulting at Cognizant.

In getting started with a data mindset, the authors aver, there are three preliminary challenges. The first challenge is for the marketing division to take a leap of faith and put some muscle and investment into a research mentality of the number-crunching variety, which can be quite contrary to the creative, more intuitive approach. The second challenge is to find the relevant pieces of data and connect them to figure out what information or insights can come out of that data. The third challenge is to take the insights gleaned from the data and actually change the way one makes decisions, based on what the data says, not what one’s intuition suggests. “It is important to note, however, that while marketing is part science, part art,” they note, “there will be a lot more science on which to base decisions that ultimately will better empower the more intuitive side of the marketer.”

Effecting change at this radical level, the authors observe, involves implanting three things into the marketing division: “First, people—certain types of people with certain types of skills that didn’t formerly fit with the marketing profile—data analytics people. Then you are introducing data, lots of it, enough to filter out usable and actionable information based on your key performance indicators. And finally, you are bringing in the technology-based tools to use with this data—database software, screens, programs— “net new” things that didn’t exist in the old marketing organization.”

Kim and Francis add, “An integrated analytics base can begin to change the internal culture of insurers in such a way that everyone, from product designers to marketers to IT to management, is engaged to think more creatively to improve the entire insurance product and service offering.”

According to the authors, P&C personal lines carriers are not currently getting reasonable returns on their huge marketing expenditures. “What marketing analytics does is provide the opportunity to make changes and redirect marketing spend in a way that’s supported by what the data suggests,” they say. “The required cultural change starts with getting marketers to embrace the marketing analytics function, to trust the data…But while many people talk about turning data into insights, the harder part is to act on it—to put your company on the line—and use those insights to make business decisions.”

The authors point out that getting data analytics to the right decision-maker at the right time requires a new way of working. “Collecting and filtering data and working with it to determine current issues, predict future needs, and see what has succeeded or failed in the past will allow companies to come up with more deliberate, focused solutions—solutions that have a basis in fact, not in intuition or tradition. What marketing analytics can give is the ability to make smarter decisions.”

Click here to read more.