Discussion between Amanda O’Donnell, Chief Customer Officer at Hollard and Paul Nelson, Managing Director of BrandMatters.
To view the video, scroll to the bottom of this article.
PN:
Many people may not have heard of Hollard. You were always a brand behind the scenes, the brand behind the brands. Brands like Real Insurance, Petsure, Woolworths and Greenstone. But now, excitingly, you’re a top five player, and that’s a really significant and exciting transformation from a very small business in Australia 22 years ago.
AOD:
It has been an incredible journey of growth for Hollard over the last 22 years. Being nimble, opportunistic, looking to challenge and kind of disrupt the insurance market. We’ve been blessed to partner with some incredible brands across Australia like you’ve mentioned. Particularly, I would say, over the last five years, we’ve really had to adapt from being a challenger to now being in the top five space. We’ve recently been very blessed to enter into a strategic partnership with Commonwealth Bank. And that, on top of our existing partnerships, has meant that we’ve just been through an incredible period of change as a business. Our private ownership gives us a fantastic advantage in terms of, not only having a long term focus as a business, but also the encouragement to be a positive business and not necessarily driven by short term decision making. Because we’ve been so focused on being a partnership-based business for so long, and becoming excellent brand custodians for our partners, we haven’t really focused so much on the Hollard brand. So whilst many will not have heard of Hollard before, it’s something that we haven’t really invested in a whole lot. But it’s something that we will do more into the future, and this project that we’ve been working on with you has been fantastic in getting a really solid start to that journey of building awareness.
PN:
Why was this project really needed now? What was the, the key opportunity in elevating the Hollard brand?
AOD:
Having gone from that start-up to now onboarding more and more employees, as you grow it becomes so much more necessary to really define who we are as a brand, and what we stand for. Not just externally for the partners in the market, but for our own employees, to create that sense of pride, and I suppose make sure that everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet. Because we’ve spent so much time really focused on our partner brands, particularly with onboarding a whole range of new employees as part of the strategic alliance with Commonwealth Bank, we just felt that now was really the time. We’ve grown substantially, and with bringing on so many more new employees, it was important for us to get this right.
PN:
There’s a lot at stake. You effectively doubled the size of your employee base. You’re now the biggest, organisation or entity within the Hollard group, globally. What do you see as the overall risks, what might have gone wrong, perhaps?
AOD:
The biggest thing that springs to mind in terms of risks is that at Hollard is that we like biting off big, audacious goals. There’s always a lot of competing projects and priorities. So we wanted to make sure we had employee involvement along the way, so that what we were building, we were building by the people, for the people. Competing priorities was definitely one of those risks. And now we’re throwing one more thing into people’s job jars, to be involved, and to give their views, their opinions and their input. But actually we had such amazing engagement. In terms of other risks, we do have a very strong South African heritage. The Hollard brand has been around long before it was established in Australia. We wanted to be respectful of that, pay homage, but also to localise, and make sure that we had something that was going to be suitable for the Australian market. We definitely wanted to make sure that we go that balance right as well.
PN:
One of the things we’ve discovered through the project is just the strength of the culture, of the Hollardites and their commitment. A critical part of that of course is introducing the Commonwealth Bank Insurance team as well.
AOD:
There’s one more risk that that’s probably worth calling out. When we’re going through this process of defining who we are as a brand, and taking our employees on that journey, it was important to acknowledge that we have been through a lot of change as a business. You can’t go through the amount of incredible growth that we’ve been through and not have change in culture. There are aspects of our culture that we want to retain. What do we want to take forward, what’s going to help drive our success into the future? Having our people, our Hollardites, involved in that process, to help kind of define that, is the reason why it has been embraced so well.
PN:
Apart from the internal changes, just the, the whole situation: the pandemic, working from home, the Royal Commission, changes in governance and structures. It’s amazing what you’ve been through, and how strongly you’ve cut through it all, and just how resilient the culture is. Let’s take things a little wider for a moment. I just wanted to talk to you about the industry in overall terms: the state of the insurance industry in 2022 and beyond, and the role of brand as part of that, what role can brand play? What difference can brand make as we encounter some of the challenges that we’ve talked about already?
AOD:
Insurance is definitely a really fascinating space. I think the role of insurance is just becoming even more and more important over time, as we’re starting to see, unfortunately, the negative impacts of climate change, floods, hail and storms. We’ve just seen such an increase in catastrophic events across Australia, and we unfortunately can’t see that getting much better over time. It’s definitely well and truly time for us to take some action here and we’re certainly serious as an insurer in playing our part in that. What’s most important in terms of brand is building that trust. Our customers and our partner brands just want to know that we’re going to be there for our customers when they need us. And increasingly, that’s a difficult but important thing for us to get right, considering that we need to think about the customer experience, to think both about customers as individuals, making sure we are being respectful of their time and providing expertise in handling their claims. Thinking on a macro level, about our customers as a whole, the impact on insurance premiums and thinking about how we manage risk. Thinking about how we work with government agencies and regulators to play our part in making sure that we keep insurance available and affordable over time. It’s not an easy challenge.
PN:
It’s a big responsibility. We talk about brands being a promise kept. But in the insurance sector particularly, it’s even more critical to deliver on the promise, which is what Hollard has been doing through partners previously, will increasingly do as it emerges as a top five insurance brand going forward, and the criticality of trust and the delivery on that. That brand promise is so important. The purpose work you mentioned as well. So that’s been fantastic.
AOD:
Our brand and purpose work, that we’ve just worked through will help with that. So when we say we use our expertise, integrity, and humanity to go further together, we can use that as a compass to guide us in our decisions as individuals, in senior leadership meetings, in deciding on products and changes to claims, innovation and how we make our experience better. All of this to build that trust in our brand, for our customers, so that they do feel like they’re in safe hands when the worst happens.
PN:
Amanda O’Donnell from Hollard, thank you for your time!
