Marketerspeak
This one is about business, but stick with me here.
A mostly forgettable advert stuck in my head today. It would have been entirely forgotten, except for the tagline at the end. “We put members first, because we don’t have shareholders.” It was for Nationwide Insurance. So I did some research. Turns out there are two (or maybe more?) basic kinds of insurance companies, at least in the States, public and mutual.
Conventional wisdom, at least my wisdom, says insurance companies want to maximize payment from its members while minimizing the payouts to members. Do that well, and you gain shareholders and investment. But this model only applies to public companies. I did not know that. In principle, mutual companies basically try to break even. There’s no incentive to maximize intake (premiums and deductibles) and minimize payouts. Of course, it’s not that simple. Both models offer pros and cons to the consumer. No need to get into that here.
If you made it through the dissertation on insurance company models, here’s the interesting part. At least interesting to me. You’re in the business, so I request your opinion. This Nationwide tagline, is it a stroke of elegance? I mean elegant in that the marketer presents a fact, one that sounds like a simple fact, and lets the audience come to the conclusion that the marketer wants to convey. Isn’t there an industry name for this technique? The tagline is making a claim without making a claim and it lets the listener feel like the conclusion is a given, when the conclusion is actually debatable. In this case, mutual companies don’t necessarily and wholly put the interest of an individual member first. If you were like me and didn’t know how insurance companies work, it makes sense and sounds about right.
I was once told about a scene in Madmen. Something about a line for a cigarette company. “The one that’s cut.” (in reference to the tobacco preparation) Every company cuts the tobacco. It doesn’t matter.
Jae-Ho
I wanted to respond to your Joe’s post first, because it made all kinds of crackly things go off in my head, but the words for this one came more immediately.
I don’t know if there’s a term for the kind of marketing you’re describing, but I do know it’s on the outs. Brands challenge every communication with the “but couldn’t X competitor say the same thing?” It’s all about the USP, baby.
At the same time, the most blatant example of what you describe is the 0% FAT sticker. When fat became the boogie man that was killing America, 0% FAT stickers starting showing up on all kinds of things – cans of tomato soup, rice crackers, loose-leaf paper (joking, but you get the idea) – that had never had fat. Some went so far as put “NOW 0% FAT”, though that changed at some point to STILL 0% FAT, leading me to believe there may have been a wrist slapping.
The point being, those stickers were clearly intended as short hand for “healthy”. Or even, “hey, now we’re healthy because it turns out fat, which was never in our product, is bad for you, and STILL not in our product!”
Cholesterol is another classic example. (And that McCain’s ad is an actual classic in my mind. Dad, what is chostelerol?)
Basically any privately-owned company could make the claim, we care about our customers first, because we have no shareholders, and when you phrase it that way it looks like a blatant lie, or at least super naive.
So why does it work (and I presume it does) for insurance?
Maybe because insurance has that pseudo-financial and governmental feel to it that makes people value it’s lack of public ownership.
I’d say the Nationwide tagline lacks elegance in this regard because it’s claim is actually, IMHIO, rather blatant – we put members first. They’re saying they do this. Now, if the tagline had been:
No shareholders. No compromise.
That would have been something else entirely. Compromising what? It’s implicit in the first statement. Shareholders compromise decisions for PROFIT. Or maybe:
No shareholders. It’s our business.
What? Huh?
No shareholders. Your business.
I could go on.
It’s the way beer companies talk endlessly about cold-filtered. Cold filtering is shit for beer – it basically kills the flavour you’re spending all that time trying to coax out of the yeast. But it sounds freaking amazing – cold beer, cold filter, no brainer.
And every major beer company can say it. And every company does.
Yeah. I have a new reading of that tagline now.
It was the “no shareholders” part that got my attention. This was news to me and it seemed an advantageous, even if spurious, thing for an insurance company to emphasize. I don’t ever remember Mutual Of Omaha telling me their corporate model, even though it’s in their name. But…
“We put members first.” I didn’t notice at first how contentious that part can be. I was struck by the unexpectedness and the information of the second part. So yeah, a more elegant way about it would be to impart the information, omit the assertion, but leave room for self discovered conclusion, like you alluded to.