1. How has Income Insurance maintained and strengthened brand trust during a challenging year? Why is it important for Income Insurance to stay rooted in its social impact identity, and how does this influence the company’s marketing and business strategy?
Although 2024 was a challenging year for Income Insurance, constantly “being in the news”, the business had a lot of positives from a performance standpoint. The reason for this was our steadfast focus on creating products that meet people’s needs and doing that through the support of our trusted advisors and partners, who also kept their customers’ interests at heart by providing them financial advice (and products) that matters.
The approach we take in building the brand is consistent with how Income builds its business, through “socially relevant business building”, i.e. solutions that are geared towards addressing a social gap, or fulfilling a personal need, which in turn helps grow the business, in revenue, profitability and customer acquisition.
Admittedly, this is not always possible, but the endeavour is to try and achieve it as often as possible.
Below are some examples:
“Complete Critical” illness products – There is a social gap of “inadequate protection against critical illnesses” in Singapore, despite evidence suggesting that cancers and heart attacks are increasingly happening at younger ages. There is also a personal gap, where middle aged Singaporeans prioritise other responsibilities over getting a critical illness cover, leaving them vulnerable to significant financial stress, if the unfortunate illness occurs. Helping to fill this gap with products that offer comprehensive protection for all stages of critical illness from diagnosis to recovery allowed for Income Insurance to create a product, Complete Critical Protect, that made strong business sense while fulfilling a social gap and a personal need.
In marketing it, the communication focused on an absolute truth – In today’s times, people can recover from cancer and heart attacks but the financial toll these take almost always mean that their dreams and aspirations have to be given up. Having the most comprehensive critical illness cover allows for their dreams to live, even after a life changing experience. Hence, the proposition was “Complete Protection. Completed Stories”, which was brought to life through the story of Arun Rosiah, a cancer survivor who achieved his dream of becoming a model, post his recovery.
eDrivo EV Insurance – While EVs have been growing rapidly in Singapore, there is still a habit of getting regular insurance for electric vehicles. Given that EVs are completely different in their make and usage, such a behaviour would lead to a lot of “financial stress” on EV car owners. For example, EV car owners need home insurance for their homes, if they have charging stations, which regular car insurance does not cover. Additionally, while the charging ecosystem is growing, EV car owners experience “range anxiety”, i.e. not being to gauge if their charge will take them the distance they need and the worry of being stuck on the road. Again, something regular car insurance does not cover. As EVs become more prevalent, the cumulative effect of this financial loss could become a social issue and certainly, is an unmet customer need. Hence, in the creation of Income eDrivo, this understanding was embedded in the design, with industry-first benefits such as “Emergency mobile charging services” to allay fears around range anxiety.
The communications for launch focused on the simple message that “an EV needs an EV insurance, not a regular insurance”. This was brought to life through a humorous “sit down conversation” between two comedians in a campaign film, talking about the benefits of EVs. This year, we will take it forward by hosting Singapore’s first Drive-in stand-up comedy, featuring these two comedians, in April 2025.
Investment linked plans – Investment linked insurance plans have been growing in the last 3-4 years, owing to interest from Singaporeans in the late 30s and 40s who are looking to be more aggressive in their wealth accumulation. Income Insurance forayed into this category in 2023, with many other insurers having already established their presence in the ILP space.
We recognised that there was a generation of Singaporeans in their 30s and 40s who were looking for wealth accumulation but with a degree of flexibility that is reflective of the times we live in – the need to take mid-career breaks, the uncertainty around jobs, the desire to pursue other interests. Simply put, there was a Gen Flex, who demanded more flexibility in their pursuit of wealth accumulation. But there were no truly meaningful products for this segment.
We chose to target this segment through the proposition of flexibility, i.e. focusing on flexibility as the key benefit of our ILP plans and calling out features such as partial withdrawals and premium holidays. In the communication, the task was to make a category-leading but otherwise generic benefit like flexibility stand out. For this, the inspiration came from the unlikeliest of places – cat memes that showed how flexible cats are. Our communication proposition, hence, was “Flexi cat your investments”, where we showed an incredibly flexible cat as a metaphor for flexibility in investments.
2. How does Income Insurance identify and support causes that resonate with its customers, and how does this impact customer loyalty?
Customer loyalty is not just a function of the causes a brand supports. It is first and foremost a function of the role the brand and its products play in the life of the customer.
Income Insurance covers more than 1.4 million customers in Singapore. Ensuring that our retention of these customers remains high is dependent on ensuring that they get the right coverage, have a seamless claims experience, have a stable, trustworthy relationship with their advisor and continue to trust in our brand. Part of (not all) ensuring that the trust remains strong, is the company’s social impact.
Income Insurance’s social focus is guided by our sustainability strategy, where we have defined our social impact areas to be retirement adequacy for an ageing Singaporean and financial protection for mental health issues.
We support causes that matter to Singapore and our customers, which is why retirement adequacy and mental health coverage are our areas of focus. Our commitment to serve the community is for the long term – $100 million over 10 years to support causes that matter to us and to our policyholders.
We have received recognition for our ongoing efforts and commitment to social good. Most recently, we received the “Champion of Good” commendation at the Company of Good 2024, the highest-tier recognition awarded to exemplary organisations for their commitment at the national level, to corporate purpose, with impact across people, the environment, and society. Such achievements have strengthened the association of social responsibility with our brand, helping to build deeper trust with our customers.
3. Can you elaborate on how the Brand Health Tracker has helped Income Insurance understand public perceptions and refine its strategies? How does the Brand Health Tracker provide insights into competitors, and how does Income Insurance leverage this data to differentiate itself in the market?
Income Insurance has been using a Brand Health Tracker (BHT) since 2009 to measure our performance vs. competitors on core attributes of trust (how much our customers trust us) and value (the value we deliver to our policyholders).
We have consistently ranked as the most trusted insurance brand in Singapore[1] even amongst non-brand users, with the highest trust score, compared to our competitors for the last 5 years, despite industry shifts and changing customer needs.
Although 2024 was a challenging year, our Trust scores remained the highest in the industry. This is a further validation of the trust Income Insurance is privileged to enjoy, with respondents agreeing that Income Insurance “can be trusted in good times and bad times”, is “socially responsible and contributes to the community” and “provides access to insurance for the underserved and unserved”.
It was heartwarming to see how much Singaporeans valued Income Insurance as a trusted brand rooted in a long-standing heritage of being the financial safety net for a growing Singapore and Singaporeans across decades. It also validates the efforts we have put in, to build a strong trusted brand across generations, through our products and services that matters most to our customers – in empowering better financial well-being for all, including the underserved.
4. What specific strategies helped Income Insurance maintain positive customer sentiment during a challenging year, and what lessons were learned?
As mentioned earlier, our guiding light remains as “socially relevant business building”. This translates to our strategic levers of business growth in terms of:
- Launching into newer categories like critical illness and investment linked plans, with a mindset to solve a social issue (inadequate protection for Singaporeans against critical illness), a personal gap (de-prioritisation of insurance protection) and a business ambition (ambitious growth in critical illness protection plans).
- Staying true and authentic in the problems we solve – for example, the insight that when cancer or heart attacks happen, while the person will recover, their dreams are the cost to pay if they are not fully covered.
The cornerstone of this approach lies in a deep understanding of the customers we serve and the channels that toil away everyday to get our products to our customers. This understanding cannot be left to chance, which is why we have been conducting monthly customer connects for close to 3 years now – where we
hear first-hand from customers on their evolving needs, pain points as well as experiences.
These learnings are translated in product, consumer promotions, communication and experience solutions to create a continuous cycle of improvement in our ability to serve customers.
5 . Could you share details about key marketing campaigns in 2024 and what made them so successful?
We had a few key marketing campaigns 2024, specifically to drive awareness of, and purchase of cancer protection, motor insurance for electric vehicles and investment-linked plans, each with its own storytelling approach, from the use of comedy to heartwarming and inspirational stories, that audiences could resonate with.
For example, in driving awareness and the importance of cancer protection, we came up with a campaign “Complete protection, complete stories” where we featured cancer survivors to drive awareness on the importance of insurance coverage, which allows cancer survivors to focus on recovery and achieve their dreams. One of whom was ex-PE teacher and cancer survivor Arun Rosiah, 60, who had always dreamt of becoming a model. We supported him by creating his very own modelling lookbook so that he could pursue his passion as a model.
In another example, Income Insurance launched our first electric vehicle (EV) insurance in a campaign “Between Two Chargers” which tapped on two well-known local comedians to showcase the differentiated coverage of our motor insurance designed especially for EVs. Upcoming in April 2025, the campaign will culminate in Singapore’s first drive-in stand-up comedy where EV drivers can watch the live show from the comforts of their cars.
These campaigns follow the successes of award-winning campaigns we did the year before as well, which includes the following:
- Gold in the Insurance category and Product, Service or Business – Launch, Innovation or Line Extension category at the Effie Awards Singapore 2024 for “The Super Safety Briefing – PA Fitness Protect”.
- Gold in the Instant Impact category at the WARC Awards Asia Pacific for “Trapped – Travel Insurance”.
- Gold award in the “Short or Long Form Video” category at the Smarties for “Trapped – Travel Insurance”.
A key campaign that has been effective in its role of growing the business was our “Trapped” campaign for travel insurance. It aimed to raise awareness of the importance of COVID coverage in a post COVID world, which can still be a nightmare if one were to contract COVID abroad. It is the first time one would ever associate a horror story to insurance which resulted in a bold yet refreshing campaign working in collaboration with well-known local director, Kelvin Tong, to launch an 18-min horror short film.
As a result of these efforts, Income Insurance was accorded “Marketer of the Year” at Effie Singapore and “Brand of the Year – Southeast Asia” at the recently concluded Campaign Asia awards.
6. What innovative marketing tactics have contributed to boosting Income Insurance’s reputation and trust metrics?How has Income Insurance incorporated personalized engagement through integrated campaigns, and what results have you seen from these efforts?
Customers today expect personalised information, services, and products tailored to their needs and life journeys. In this regard, we continue to build the muscle to better understand each customer profile using data signals with the end goal of providing adequate coverage and protection for each of our existing customers. To truly deploy this at scale, it needs to be a multichannel and touchpoint approach.
Loyalty – We continue to look at the entire journey with a renewed focus on existing customers – to drive retention and loyalty. Our customers get exclusive access to merchant offers around the themes of Travel, Wellness and Health. The goal is to create an ecosystem of ‘protection’ around our customers which includes insurance protection from Income Insurance and other forms of protection through preferred partners. We saw a 10x growth in YoY redemptions as part of our Income Treats programme for 2024 and would like to continue this momentum into 2025.
Cross Sell – To drive deeper relationships with existing Income customers, we launched a programme to convert transient customers (e.g. only travel insurance) to longer term general and life insurance products. The campaigns are segmented based on the depth of the current relationship and this allows us to design a journey, product and promo combo that is most relevant to that customer segment. We were able to achieve set targets and aim to extend this initiative to other product combinations.
Continued Improvement In Experience – Apart from this, Singapore is also seeing a payments revolution. COVID led to rapid digitisation of payment modes and customers now have a choice of methods to pay for premiums and receive payout. At the same time, regulatory bodies are bringing in new regulations to further streamline this – for e.g. Singapore going cheque-less by 2026. We are keeping a keen eye on this and want to remain ahead of the curve in implementing such improvements in the payment and purchase experience of Income products across channels.
In our endeavour to become the most preferred insurance partner to the people of Singapore, personalisation becomes an enabler across the customer journey from pre purchase to existing customer touchpoints such as onboarding, loyalty programs, cross sell and advisor enablement.
7. How does Income Insurance plan to continue meeting customer expectations and staying ahead in the highly competitive insurance industry in the years to come?
As an established composite insurer in Singapore and an impact organisation, we are uniquely positioned to drive business growth while continuing our purpose of empowering financial well-being for all. Both objectives are intertwined and will continue to be the driving force behind the creation of innovative and meaningful product portfolios covering life, health, travel, motor, personal accident and other insurance.
We focus every day on driving “commercial creativity”; i.e. creative and innovative product and marketing solutions that are geared towards growing the business, in terms of revenue, profitability and customer acquisition across our business lines. The key to doing good is to consistently do well, which is what we strive for, at Income Insurance.
