Survey Says: Insights About the Insurance Trade Media
April 24, 2012 by Charles Wasilewski · Leave a Comment
Editors and reporters with the insurance trade media rely on public relations professionals with insurance brands to research and create stories. But there’s plenty of room for insurance marketers to change and improve in their trade media publicity efforts, judging by comments from the trade media.
Those are two key conclusions from an Aartrijk survey of key insurance trade media editors and reporters.
The online survey garnered 17 responses (and thus is more useful for qualitative results than for statistically valid quantitative results) and was conducted in 2011. It found that:
Playing to the Stereotype: Four Insurance Branding Lessons from the New Jersey Governor
April 10, 2012 by Charles Wasilewski · 5 Comments
Take These Four Insurance Branding Lessons Home With You
From modest beginnings in New Jersey, a larger-than-life politician has emerged onto the national stage: Governor Chris Christie. And he’s brought along branding experiences that apply to insurance.
Christie was criticized by opponents as an underqualified political appointee and a legal lightweight when he was nominated by President George W. Bush to the post of U.S. Attorney for the State of New Jersey. During Christie’s tenure from 2002 through 2008, the U.S. Attorney’s office won convictions or pleas of guilty from 130 public officials (state, county and local), both Democratic and Republican — without losing a single case.
Tebow This: Does Your Brand’s Muscle Memory Need Changing?
January 10, 2012 by Charles Wasilewski · 2 Comments
Tim Tebow, Denver Broncos starting quarterback, Heisman Trophy winner -- and rebranding lesson
Tim Tebow was the biggest brand in college football just three years ago. During a career at the University of Florida from 2006-9, he set records in career passing efficiency and total rushing touchdowns in the Southeastern Conference (considered by many football fans to be the most competitive conference in the country).
Tebow’s teams sported a 48-7 record during his four-year career and won two national championships. He won the Heisman Trophy, emblematic of college football’s best player, in 2007, when he became the first college football player to both rush and pass for 20 or more touchdowns in a single season.
Now, Tebow is among the biggest brands in professional football, in just his second National Football League season. His number 15 Denver Broncos jersey is the largest-selling among all NFL players. Last weekend, he threw a game-winning touchdown pass in the first play of overtime to capture Denver’s first playoff victory in six years — spawning a record 9,420 tweets per second, according to Twitter.
But the two Tim Tebows are totally different brands, even though both have been successful.
So, what would one of the most-successful college quarterbacks of all time even need or want to change? Read more
It’s Christmas Eve. Let’s Go to Grandmother’s House (on Facebook)!
December 20, 2011 by Charles Wasilewski · 1 Comment
“Over the river and through the woods,
To Grandmother’s house we go;
The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh,
Through (the) white and drifted snow!”
– traditional children’s song
Those who don’t get to Grandmother’s house by horse and sleigh (or airplane, bus, car, or train) are now traveling there via Facebook. They’re going to all kinds of places on the social networking site.
Facebook.com was the most-visited web site on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day 2009, and on New Year’s Day 2010, according to data reported by Experian Hitwise. “Facebook” was also Read more
Greater Visibility, Lower Cost: Top Agencies Prove It
December 6, 2011 by Charles Wasilewski · 5 Comments
Agents and brokers are boosting their advertising and marketing efforts.
But they’re doing so without spending more. In fact, the data show they’re spending less.
That’s according to Shirley Lukens, AAI, principal of Reagan Consulting, who shepherds the annual Best Practices Study, a joint project of Reagan and the Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America (Big “I”). Formerly the head of industry affairs for Big “I”, Shirley was a mover behind launching the Best Practices initiative in 1993.
Speaking at the ASCnet TENCon industry event in September, Lukens noted that the most recent 2011 Best Practices research showed that agencies in the study “really stepped up their marketing advertising. They really aggressively advertised and marketed in ways that they hadn’t done in years past.”
But the agencies were not increasing their outlay for marketing; they were keeping it level or even reducing it in some cases, according to the financial data in the Best Practices research. Lukens looked more closely and even spoke to a few of the agency principals. She reported: Read more
Gift Card In the Big Store
October 11, 2011 by Charles Wasilewski · Leave a Comment
“It’s like a gift card in a big store.”
Recently a client made that statement at the conclusion of a discussion about a new branding initiative for his insurance firm. The client was delighted about having a range of choices in the creative materials we had developed. But he also was a bit torn and forlorn about having to only choose one approach from more than one choice.
Ah, there’s the rub, as Shakespeare once said.
With a marketing budget, or any budget for that matter, insurance brands need to make choices. Read more
I Called You. Now Play a Bunch of Ads. Please!
September 13, 2011 by Charles Wasilewski · 1 Comment
I was reviewing some Forrester data about mobile marketing — 21% of mobile phone owners used a smart phone to access the Internet in 2009, up from 11% in 2006 — and recalled a recent experience with a mobile “marketer” (using the term loosely, of course).
I wanted to do something American one nice summer weekend: See a movie. I was in the car with my family (not driving, of course). We had agreed on the movie, “Lincoln Lawyer.” (Admittedly, seeing a movie spur-of-the-moment was more spontaneous than I’m known to be. But maybe that serves me right, as you’ll see in a moment.)
So I looked up the phone number of a local theater on a mobile telephone.
I’d called movie theaters in the past from an old-fashioned landline telephone, and had been able to quickly find out movie times.
Silly me.
Read more
Teaching Her Children Well
August 2, 2011 by Charles Wasilewski · 1 Comment
St. Margaret of Cortona School
While Maureen Wall Bentley and I were roughly the same age (she was younger, which gave me pause as I confronted the news of her death), I looked up to her.
We lived parallel lives that brought us to a similar place: Aartrijk, a branding and public relations firm formed by our shared business colleague, Peter van Aartrijk, in 1999. I joined in 2001 as a consultant after a 17-year career in corporate communications; I had known and respected Peter from my early career days as an editor at A.M. Best Company. Maureen joined Aartrijk a year later from Independent Agent magazine and the Big I (Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America), where she had worked with Peter, after starting in magazine publishing.
I realized this connection when I walked by Maureen’s grammar school, St. Margaret of Cortona School in Bronx, N.Y. on the way to her funeral Mass. The paved schoolyard, the well-built school building, the flag flying high — these were similar to my grammar school, St. Paul School in Princeton, N.J., 90 miles south of Maureen’s on Riverdale Avenue. Read more
Talking in Public? Begin With the End in Mind
June 28, 2011 by Charles Wasilewski · 1 Comment
A perfectly happy, joyous, exciting graduation season this year was blotted only by one thing: A too-long, rambling, unfocused graduation speaker.
I won’t reveal the speaker or the educational institution (in order to protect the guilty), and there’s no need to go over the gory details. Suffice it to say that this particular speaker spoke for 46 minutes (at a school where the prior-graduations’ longest speech was 35 minutes, and that was considered long). That’s about as long as a typical class at this school.
While sitting in a bleacher seat (gratefully in an air-conditioned building), I looked at my watch after 15 minutes, spotted eye-rolls from fellow attendees after 20 minutes, and heard discernible groans and over-their-breath protests after 25 minutes. At first I felt sorry for the speaker, who obviously had not prepared himself correctly nor asked the right questions of the host institution. Then I began to lose patience. Then I began to lose attention.
I spotted four mistakes this speaker made … Read more
True Name Grit
May 31, 2011 by Charles Wasilewski · Leave a Comment
With the summer kickoff of movie season this past Memorial Day weekend, I thought back to a recent movie I enjoyed. In the 2011 remake of Western film True Grit, 14-year-old heroine Mattie Ross hires rough-hewn U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn to hunt down and bring to justice Tom Chaney, her father’s killer. Cogburn is an “aging, one-eyed, overweight, trigger-happy, hard-drinking man.” But to Ross, he’s the right man to ride out onto dangerous ground and find the elusive Chaney, who has a head start fleeing across the river from Arkansas into Indian Territory (now the state of Oklahoma).
Rooster has “grit” (Ross’s word), even if he’s time-beaten, weather-worn and (in actor Jeff Bridges’s take) has a muffled, mouth-chewing way of speech.
The girl heroine insists on coming along, so Rooster and Ross ride out on the range, encountering dead bodies, outlaws, rattlesnakes and other hazards. [Plot spoiler: Rooster tracks and kills his quarry (with help from a Matt Damon-acted Texas Ranger who has his own reasons for hunting down the villianous Tom Chaney). Mattie Ross gets her justice.]
I’m not a movie buff nor a Western fan, but this well-done movie led me to reflect on naming and insurance brand tagline projects we’ve been working on here at Aartrijk: Read more