The Manulife Financial Corporate - Marketing Reserach and Communication

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Strategies

Manulife use three strategies for communications, which are Pull, Push and Profile strategies.

For the pull strategy, it mainly focuses on mass media advertising and sales promotions, which is related to our brand strongly. Manulife provide discounted products to the consumers, and use the advertisement to let more consumers get incentives to know more information. Thus, the consumers will ask for information from the agents, and then the agents will try to sell the products to the consumers.

For the push strategy, Manulife also provide corporate insurance to the companies. Then, the company can help the employees to buy insurance from Manulife, this helps consumers easily choose our brand instead of buying other brands products in the market. Also, Manulife have co-operated with Development Bank of Singapore (DBS), that Manulife will pay $ 1.2 billion in installments to DBS. The agreement states that DBS will sell Manulife products exclusively in the following 15 years, and this helps Manulife to get a larger customer base for their business.

For the profile strategy, it influences all stakeholders and promotes the company’s image as well. Manulife only provides products and thinking about the marketing methods to increase sales, but they don’t sell the products directly from the company to the customers, the products must sell by the agents, and the agents can get the commissions. This shows that Manulife business selling method is very relying on the agents’ activities, thus their selling area is very large in the market, and everyone can find the agents to buy products. For example, the corporate insurance, mutual funds, self-insurance…all of these products can be promoted to everyone.

The positioning strategy is mainly to use “Same for Less” and “More for Less”, because Manulife provide the same products but reduce the price, or provide a better plan with a less price. These two positioning strategy can encourage more consumers to buy the products.

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Tactics

I am going to describe the five communication tools that applied in the campaign.

For the advertising, Manulife invited PakHo Chau to be the endorsement person for the advertising. His message is to let the publics to know the information about the fitness trackers, and the discount that provided by Manulife is that, the price of the insurance plan will be reduced depends on the walk steps count by the tracker. This brings a health message to the publics, and let consumer have more incentives to buy this products. Also, PakHo’s image is healthy, because he is a basketball player in a basketball team, thus it is good for he to encourage more people to do exercise frequently. The advertising method is using TV broadcast, street advertisement broad, and Internet diffusion, all of these methods is good for the publics to receive the message easily.

For the sales promotion, Manulife provide a lot of discounts and rewards in this period to encourage customers to buy more products. As the promotion period is very short, so the consumers need to make decision quickly. Also, the company will give more commissions to the agents in this period, which can encourage the agents to work harder to sell more products. .

For the public relation, Manulife hold different career and financial seminar to attract more people attentions to know more about the products of Manulife by the Public Relation department. Although there are none promotions of the discounted plans during the seminar, agents are easily to open a topic of buying insurance in this occasion, thus promote the products to the participants easily. Also, Manulife joins the Walks for Millions that held by the Community Chest every year. There are a lot of agents that join this event, this shows the team spirits of the brand and strengthen the social responsibility image of Manulife.

For the personal selling, Manulife would hold some booth in the baby, marry and career seminars, to encourage the some potential consumers to buy the products. Also, Manulife is an agents-based company, therefore they don’t have any counter for selling products, and this helps the agents to have more opportunities and incentive to promote the products in the publics. Therefore, the quality of the agents are very good because they are required to explain the plans to the consumer deeply.

For the direct marketing, Manulife agents would send email to the customers, to promote more current discount or products information. Although a lot of insurance are willing to do a cold call to the publics to increase their company sales, Manulife agents only contact with the customers instead of the publics. Therefore, the agents need to work harder to contact with more potential customer in their contact list.

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Evaluation of Effectiveness

I am going to choose advertising and sales promotion to evaluate.

First, to evaluate the advertising effectiveness, we can use five different methods. For the pre-testing, the creative aspects of the advert prior to release using concept tests, focus groups, consumer ‘juries’, Manulife can invited some people from publics to ask them for the aspects of the promotions. For the post-testing, it can evaluate the effectiveness after release using recall and recognition, tests and sales- based tests. For the tracking, it collects regular data about buyers’ perceptions, awareness, brand image and preferences. For the likability, Manulife can research to what degree people enjoyed the adverts from the customers.

Second, to evaluate the advertising effectiveness, we can use two different researches which are pre-testing research and post-testing research. To do the pre-test research, Manulife can use the focus group discussions with targeted groups of customers, which can test the ideas and concepts that the company is considering to implement. Also, they can use the Hall Tests which means that the respondents are invited from the street to participate in a study in a nearby venue with others. Typically researchers are looking for attitudes and usage potential for one or more promotions being planned. Questionnaires are used to gauge reaction and attitudes to each. For the post-test