Stop Selling Insurance!
We all know it's hard to find someone with the same insurance as you. But what if you could work with an agent or company that sells 20 different types of insurance? You can compare rates and coverage from A to Z!
Just because our name is "Allstate" doesn't mean we only sell Allstate products. We are proud of our independent agents, who are experts in their fields and can help you find the right solution for your needs.
We're Allstate Insurance Company, and we work with you to protect what you value most.
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In our view, this is a major shift in the insurance category. Stop telling them to buy insurance . . . start helping them solve their problems! The problem may not be "I don't have enough coverage." The problem may be "I can't tell the difference between all these options."
The phrase "the right solution for your needs" does an excellent job in implying that Allstate will do everything it can to find the right coverage for your circumstances--and they've given themselves a better chance of doing just that by working with independent agents who specialize in specific products they know inside and out.
Their strategies have changed and now they can tell the new story. But what about the old one?
Given that Allstate has just made this shift, it would be surprising if their website continued to push the "buy insurance" angle. But when we went to find their website, we found it at www.allstate.com . . . and when you click on that link, you get a page with a list of links with non-descriptive names like "Auto Insurance Quote," "Home Insurance Quote," and so on. It's not clear at all what kind of insurance you could get from Allstate based on those titles.
So how did they decide to name their site? Well, according to Wikipedia, Allstate had a handful of names they considered before settling on "Allstate." One of the names that was considered was . . . wait for it . . . "Insurance Online."
The site that is now www.allstate.com, www.allstate.com, began its life as www.insuranceonline.com.
Without question, Allstate has made some big strides in their approach to the category--but from a marketing perspective, it's amazing what they have yet to do. They still haven't even put a "quote" button on their site to allow people to get an instant online quote. And they haven't changed the name of their domain from .com to .net or .solutions or any other "theme" that goes with their new identity as problem-solvers rather than providers of insurance products.
As we write this, Allstate is in the process of a major shift in how they want to be perceived. Their marketing is changing to reflect that--but we're not sure they've gone far enough.
We suspect that when they re-design their site and create their new brand identity, they will move from www.allstate.com to a domain with ".solutions" or ".problemsolving" at the beginning of the URL. And even though insurance agents are now "independent agents" rather than representatives of the company, perhaps by working with them instead of for them, Allstate will soon have even more power than it had before.
Merrill Davis is the author of The Inclusive Leader, a book that explains how to create an inclusive leadership style.
In his latest book Merrill shares something he has been trying to teach since 1977: "the right approach (to finding solutions) is not always the same as the traditional one." This idea seems to fly directly in the face of what we've just written about Allstate. Our view is that if a company truly wants to incorporate this new approach into their sales and marketing processes, they ought to rethink their entire company name and product image. They can't have different names for two different approaches.
Merrill's advice is more realistic. He says yes, you need to change your company name, your product names, maybe even the way you describe your services. But Merrill says that in most companies you don't need to start from scratch. You can add this new approach as a complement to the old one and create hybrid solutions.
In Merrill's book The Inclusive Leader he explains the concept of "hybrid branding." The concept is not to try and force customers into a new value position but to allow them to discover it on their own over time.
He writes that this process takes three phases: 1) brand development; 2) transition of existing customers; 3) new customer acquisition. In the first phase, you decide on a name that best reflects your new value position. In the second phase, you begin to communicate that information to your existing customers. And in the third phase, you create an advertising campaign to attract new customers that reflects your new value position without alienating your existing customer base.
In Merrill's book he has a chapter on each phase of this process. Before we get to those chapters we wanted to share our own experience with creating hybrid solutions and what we've learned from it.
Conclusion
What is a hybrid solution? It is a product or service that is not new. It does not solve the problem as well as your competitor's product and does not have all the features you need but it is somehow uniquely different or better than what your competitors are doing. The hybrid approach gets people to buy your product and has many of their needs in mind.
Hybrid solutions make customers think that they can't have what they really want by choosing your competitor. You tell them they must choose you, the "hybrid" solution, for one reason or another.
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Stop Selling Insurance!