The Manulife Financial Corporate - Marketing Reserach and Communication

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Content Page

1. Nature of the Campaign
2. Tools Highlight
3. Objectives and Target Audience
4. Strategies
5. Tactics
6. Evaluation of Effectiveness

Nature of the Campaign

The Manulife Financial Corporate is an insurance and financial services company from Canada, which started their business in 1887, and expands their southern China branch in Hong Kong in 1897. In 2008, Standard & Poor's have rated Manulife from AA+ to AAA which is the best rating in their rating system, and this proved that Manulife got a strong brand and financial management.

Their company vision is” Manulife aims to be the most professional financial services organization in the world, providing strong, reliable, trustworthy and forward-thinking solutions for our clients' most significant financial decisions.”

Their products mainly are individual, group life and health life insurance plans, Mandatory Provident Fund and Occupational Retirement Schemes, mutual funds and wealth management solutions. Manulife restructure their plans and provide some new plans in each year, and they provide a lot of short period discount to encourage people to buy their products in every year.

They have a special campaign in every year that is aiming to increase the sales in a short period, the started date is first Monday of August, and the duration is 10 weeks. They changed their content every year, which is changing different discount of plans, and I am going to focus to analyze the recent year’s campaign methods. This campaign purpose is to let customers have more incentive buy their products, and let the agents work harder in this period to earn more commission. In this campaign period, customers can use less money to buy a plan and have more rewards, in the other hand, the agents can have more commissions when they get any contracts in this period.

They both use promotional and thematic advertising, but mainly focus in thematic advertising because they provide a lot of discount and rewards to incentivize customers to buy the products. Although they have invited an artist to do a promotional advertising, but this only happened in last year. They invited PakHo Chau to make some advertisement tapes on TV, and also released some advertisement broad around the street and MTR stations, these helped attracting more people attentions to the campaign.

Tools Highlight

Now, I am going to briefly describe how to use the communication tools to apply into the campaign.

First, Manulife invited PakHo Chau to be the endorsement person for the advertising. He firmed some advertisement tapes on TV and some advertisement broad on the street. Also, PakHo do some streaming live by using the Facebook streaming function, to promote the fitness tracker of Manulife products from the campaign.

Second, Manulife hold different career and financial seminar to attract more people attention to know more about the products of Manulife by the Public Relation department. Also, Manulife joins the Walks for Millions that held by the Community Chest in every year, this helps to strengthen the social responsibility image of Manulife.

Third, Manulife did a great job in the sales promotion way, they provide a lot of discounts and rewards in this period thus encourage customers to buy more their products. Also, the company will give more commissions to the agents in this period, this encourage the agents to work harder to find more customers.

Fourth, Manulife would send email to the customers, to promote more current discount or products information by direct marketing. Although a lot of insurance are willing to do a cold call to the publics to increase their company sales, Manulife only contact with the customers instead of the publics.

Fifth, Manulife also did a great job in personal selling. Manulife would hold some booth in the baby, marry and career seminars, to encourage the publics 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 incentive to promote the products in the publics.

Objectives and Target Audience

I am going to use the SMARRTT method to describe the objectives of this campaign in direct and indirect way.

Direct Objectives: increase 5% sales within 10 weeks by providing different discount and rewards to customers, and more commissions to agents to encourage them to sell or buy the insurance products

Specific: increase sales in a short period

Measurable: increase 5% sales

Achievable: pay more commissions to encourage agents work harder

Realistic: sales can at least increase 3%

Relevant: more discounts reward and commissions can give more incentive to the agents and customers

Targeted: new potential customers that not much willing to buy insurance because of the price

Time Specific: within 10 weeks

Indirect Objectives: increase awareness of the brand to get more new potential customers by release more advertisement broad in MTR station

Specific: increase awareness of the brand

Measurable: 40% of the campaign objective (increase 5% sales) to be new customers

Achievable: the discount rewards cam encourage some poor people to buy insurance

Realistic: draw more people attention by advertising in MTR station

Relevant: PakHo give a good image to the public thus people are willing to get more information of his advertisement

Targeted: publics that use MTR to transport

Time Specific: within 10 weeks

For the targeted audience, I am going to use the demographic and psychographic to show out the target audience.

Demographic

Manulife targeted to the people that aged 25-45, whose mainly are married and going to have a family. In this group of age, they have a good economics ability to buy some insurance for themselves or their family’s members.

Psychographic

Manulife targeted to the people, who are not willing to buy insurance because of thinking the insurance is useless and wasting money. As Manulife provide some discounts to the public, this encourages people to use less money to buy insurance products.