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Brand shapes how people think, feel, and make decisions long before a transaction. In this exclusive interview, Michael Roberts, CMCO of MetLife, shares how behavioral science informs their brand strategy, how purpose and experiences drive the associations that influence behavior, and how MetLife balances legacy, relevance, and impact. Invaluable insights you won't find anywhere else.
Our definition of brand leans heavily on the last few decades of cognitive science – both neuroscience and behavioral science. Books like Kanneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow have popularized some of the key concepts that influence our definition of brand, including that humans make decisions with both conscious, and importantly, subconscious brain processes. We also have research on deeply embedded cognitive biases and their relationship to commercial decision making – concepts like optimism bias and availability bias are important influences in our understanding of the role of brand.
We view brand as an important lever that can prime the conscious and subconscious cognitive processes that drive decision-making and behaviors in our favor. Simply put, and at its most basic level, we view brand as the aggregate positive and negative associations present in the minds of our stakeholders that drive decisions and behaviors. We see four key drivers of associations: experiences, alignment of purpose/values, participation with stakeholders, and messaging memorability.
In our research we found that for our businesses and broadly for our category, experiences and alignment to purpose are some of the strongest drivers of positive associations. For us, events – both first- and third-party events – have the some of the greatest potential to drive the associations that influence decisions and behaviors in our favor.
Experience and alignment with our purpose are essential association drivers. We first evaluate all marketing investments based on their alignment with our purpose and values. When examining events, we focus on how each event fits into the customer journey, prioritizing the effectiveness of an integrated, end-to-end channel approach rather than judging each channel separately. In our B2B businesses especially, events can influence customers at multiple stages of their journey. We strive to avoid viewing channels in isolation, misleadingly centering the channel over the customer, or fostering unnecessary competition between channels. Our experience shows that cross-channel engagement—aligned with the overall customer journey and driven by experimentation—deliver the best commercial results, with events playing a key role.
We are a strong legacy brand in highly intermediated retail businesses and in long sales cycle B2B business where impressions and awareness are not as closely correlated to our key commercial outcomes as may be the case for other companies. When looking at our sponsorships, we focus on the associations we want to create for each of our stakeholders and the direct impact they can enable for: our employees, our customers, our shareholders, and our communities. While impact looks different for each stakeholder, for large scale sponsorships, we focus on both broad and specific impact, stakeholder by stakeholder. One important consideration across stakeholder groups is durable mental availability that reinforces key associations. What we have found is that in infusing our sponsorships with meaning through unique experiences aligned to our purpose and values, we build trust, credibility, and enhance our reputation.
Back in 2011 when we inked the naming rights agreement, MetLife in the US was a major player in retail life insurance, auto insurance, and home insurance with a large force of insurance agents. We had also just bought AIG’s international life insurance business, Alico. The weight of the entire business was towards retail distribution. The original vision behind naming rights to MetLife Stadium was to enhance brand visibility, particularly in the New York Tri-state area where we are headquartered. Over time, the vision has evolved to include leveraging the stadium differently for our significantly changed business mix, for community engagement initiatives, enriching our storytelling, and creating memorable experiences for all our stakeholders. The stadium has also evolved with more globally relevant events and concerts the pinnacle of which is coming this summer with the FIFA Men’s World Cup Finals.
As company, we are motivated by our purpose – Always with you, building a more confident future. We believe that a virtuous cycle beginning with employees living that purpose will enable us to deliver for our customers, which in turn enables us to better serve our communities and the cumulative outcome is a benefit to our shareholders. Because our brand is an expression of our purpose and alignment to purpose is one of the strongest influencers of positive associations, it is a natural act for brand to be front and center for how we deliver for our stakeholders. The is where there is an important distinction between branding and brand – the strength of the brand is influenced by all parts of the company while the marketing, communications, and customer experience teams steward the branding – how we show up visually, verbally, and through experiences. This understanding enables the entire company to rally around their impact on our stakeholders and embrace the stewardship of the marketing, communications, and customer experience teams.
Differentiation can be defined in many ways and there are many ways to evaluate it – product, price, access, service, experience, etc. As we think about our brand, we prefer to lean into how it lives in the brain as an influencer of decisions and behavior. Our focus is not necessarily on being different as the brain often prioritizes the familiar, rather we focus on salience (the density of associations), relevance (a high proportion of positive associations) and distinctiveness (the clarity of associations). We aim to achieve an appropriate balance between functional and emotional associations to establish a strong mental footprint for the brand. Where gaps are identified, we implement targeted strategies to address insufficient, unclear or negative associations. Our goal is not to be emotional as a brand, it is to ensure that we have the right density, proportion, and clarity of both functional and emotional associations and to target in a way that we build and reinforce associations.
An interesting observation from our research is that a long history can as easily be associated with positives or negatives, but a lack of connection to history for a brand that has history, is often negative. Regardless of demographic, history and nostalgia are meaningful. Brands have an opportunity to use history as a positive in the present and, for us, given our purpose, as a mechanism to provide confidence in the future. An example is how we have been a leader in Group Insurance in the U.S. since the 19th century, with customers who have been with us for over 100 years. That longevity of service can help our customers see how that leadership will extend into the future for their benefit. Or that our 50 years in Japan is a signal of a confident future for our policy holders. For us freshness is not eschewing legacy and history, rather, we leverage them.
What we’ve understood for our category is that brand spend can be an inaccurate proxy for what drives decisions and behaviors. There are some exceptions to this in categories where media spend has become an arms race and large media budgets are built into business models. Regardless, spending time and money on understanding existing associations and cognitive biases, the drivers of associations (purpose, experience, message memorability, participation with stakeholders), and the weight of those drivers for the brand and the category can provide a road map for efficient brand building. Live events have so many permutations and there are so many creative ways to leverage live events that hit all the association drivers that every market strategy and budget can find a fit.
Sponsorships tend to live in the world of brand and not tied to commercial outcomes. The marketing world has created an artificial separation between brand marketing and performance marketing or brand marketing and growth marketing. There’s a movement underway to bring these disciplines closer together but there are operational, organizational, and cultural barriers to overcome. Sponsorships are an area where there is challenging work to do connect the activation – often a standalone tactic -- to specific commercial outcomes, but it can be done, and it is where marketers should start vs. with vanity metrics that indicate the value of the sponsorship agreement.
If I could go back, I would remind myself that innovation in marketing isn’t just about ideas, innovation in marketing has to be grounded in analytics and insights and shows up in execution – much of which is all about process and technology. It’s in execution that we create value, and innovation needs to show up there.