EMI recently attended the LIMRA Marketing & Research Conference at Disney World. Our take-away from the conference: No business today can achieve sustainable growth and gain market share without being customer-centric. Easy to say, but less easy to implement.

As an exhibitor, we had dozens of conversations on companies reassessing and refining their client-centered strategies. The challenge of operating with a consumer marketing lens, versus the traditional product-centric lens, which so many companies have done, was well expressed in a recent McKinsey report* on U.S. retirement readiness:

[Providers] “have a unique, largely untapped opportunity…But to capture it, firms must stop driving product innovation based on actuarial models and instead lead with a strong consumer marketing lens…financial institutions must take a much stronger consumer view as they create new product prototypes.”

These challenges relate to how companies engage with their channel partners to enable customer-centric throughput. For example, one mutual fund leader at the Conference addressed investment language and how “financial security” resonates far more than “financial freedom.” An insurance leader explained the need to help agents establish an online social presence and keep diverse customers engaged through social media.

The LIMRA event helped us to crystalize several fundamental questions:

• “Am I using customer-centricity to achieve competitive advantage with my channels and end-customers?”
• “Is my organization unified in this approach, even if product, sales and research are in silos?”
• “Am I extending my consumer-centric expertise and assets (e.g., research, collateral to advisor and agent channels) that arms advisors and agents with educational and motivational client tools?”
• “Am I adapting core messaging to engage different generations, particularly as they age and their needs evolve, across relevant traditional and digital communications?”
• “Am I preparing for what my distribution channels will need in the next two years based on what my research, marketing analysis and industry trends are reporting now?”

These questions speak to the need for strategies and tactics to help financial service institutions to grow share with their captive and third party distribution channels. EMI examined many of these questions at our recent webinar Four Strategies to Win the Hearts and Minds of Your Advisor Channel – and Grow Share which shows you the need for customer-centric throughput and the importance of building better advisor relationships that can be adapted to sales channels and ultimately end customers. This is a topical concern of research and marketing experts at investment and insurance firms alike as we clearly recognized at the LIMRA event.

* McKinsey & Company, “Why Are We Not There Yet? An Update on U.S. Retirement Readiness,” May 2013.