NIB Health Insurance: Overview, Strategies, And Marketing Essay.

You will prepare a portfolio pitch and brief to your advertising agency. Students are to use choose their own firm and apply theoretical knowledge of models and concepts to the 7 Ps and apply them to your chosen service firm. Refer to weekly contents in order to choose and find the models and theories. Students are to:

1. Offer the firm description, target market and service positioning
2. Use service theories to analyse your current position for each of the 7 Ps
3. Offer a specific marketing strategy, objective and action
4. What they are trying to achieve for your firm and make recommendations for an integrated services marketing and branding plan to the agency
5. Each page will refer to one of the 7 Ps and include the analysis,
6. The portfolio will also include the brief to the agency and Integrated service marketing plan
7. You are to include a self-reflection on the service marketing elements and practices that has been learnt.

Overview of NIB Health Insurance

NIB is an Australian financier and catalyst of health care in Australia, which provides insurance supports to the health care sector. They had begun their journey in the year 1952 as a health insurance provider to the workers at the BHP Steel works. They never looked back since then and continued to evolve as one of the solutions to the health care sector of Australia. It is also providing health coverage or insurance to people living in and outside of the country such as in New Zealand. They became privatized in the year 2007 when they were named the first private health insurance company to be listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX). In the year 2010 they actually moved to some international locations to serve the international students and workers. In the year 2016, the company has announced its acquisition of World Nomads, which is the third largest distributor of travel insurance in Australia. They continued their expansion to other parts of world. In this context, they achieved another milestone when they acquired TOWER Medical Insurance Limited of New Zealand for approximately around NZ$102 million. This is how they entered into New Zealand and soon became the second largest health service provider in the country. They achieved another milestone when they developed Whitecoat and launched it in the year 2013. The service is highly useful as this provides information of approximately around 210,000 health care service providers across 25 different services such as dental. It does not only provide the contact information of the health service provider only but it also provided their rating information as well. This indeed is very important for judging the usefulness of the chosen physician or health service provider. In 2014, the Whitecoat service had allowed for the first time ever to the customers to post their ratings based on their individual experiences. This is also very helpful while deciding the physician or the health service provider of choice. In the year 2014, it shared its hand with the AXA PPP to launch global health coverage for the New Zealanders. Nevertheless, AXA PPP is the leading medical insurer across the globe. The joint venture had then enabled the company to support the New Zealanders at the different parts of world with their varied range of insurance coverage (NIB Strategic Overview 2010).

Target market of the company is all those common people and the workers who are working in Australia and New Zealand. Their target customers fall within all the age groups such as 0-19, 20-39, 40-59 and 60 Plus. They have a broad list of target customers such as overseas customers, travelers, pensioners etc. They also target many other customers with their broad range of services such as emergency assist, overseas visitor’s & student’s medical insurance, supporting to those who had lost their luggage by any means etc (Wilson and Gilligan 2012).

Target market and positioning strategies

They have different strategies for the positioning of the services, which is providing them a competitive edge over their competitors. Their service positioning strategies are as follows (Blankson and Crawford 2012):

• Getting into customer’s insightsthrough their range of innovative services such as health supports to the pensioners, overseas student’s & visitor’s insurance coverage etc.
• Listening to the customers queries is another strategy, which is providing them a firm control over their target customers. This is also helping themto position their services even more comprehensively than its competitors can
• They are highly innovative with their strategy, which is why they have kept on moving with some excellent achievements to their credit. They also create value by focusing more on the innovation, which is also reflected in their series of innovative products such as coverage of overseas visitors & students

The 7 Ps is an extended modification of the theory 4 Ps, which has included some more parts into considerations. Following are the 7 Ps for the NIB Health Insurance Company (Wirtz 2012):

• Product- They have a wide range of products such as OSHC, Dental Plus, Travel Insurance, Just Extras, NIB Value Life and Loyalty Removal
• Place- They have initially started their journey within the country; however, later on they moved to some other parts of world such as New Zealand
• Price- They have different policies with different prices, which they have strategized for their different target customers. In addition to this, they also have excess package, which is needed to be paid for availing the hospital stay. The package costs around $250 0r $500 per person
• Promotion- They have numerous distribution strategies such as cross channel integration, featuring in emerging service & sales channels and marketing agents
• People- Their people fall into varied groups such as overseas students & travelers, national pensioners, national workers & students, common people who seek medical treatment etc
• Process- The sales are done with the help of numerous strategies such as Call Centre supports on the policies, approximately around 18 retail centers, multiple online sales etc.
• Physicalevidence- Printed materials in the form of PDF for the online usage and hard copy for the offline purposes. These all happen at the different physical contact resources for the company such as retailer outlets, customer centers etc.

Increasing engagement in the online marketing strategy has remained their one of the most integral assets, which they use to capture the attention of a wide customer network and to come closer to their requirement. It also includes online video releases covering different topics at the different occasions. They also use cross channel integration to come closer to the customers such as through customer care centers, online sales and corporate & retail outlets. They also promote their brand through the use of some other media such as flying balloons over the sports ground. Industrial advertising has been stabilized, which is giving a stabilized growth to the sales of the services and the products (Wirtz and Lovelock 2016).

They have numerous marketing objectives, which they are fulfilling with their numerous unique marketing strategies. Following are the list of marketing objectives, which are serving the organizational goal of NIB (NIB Strategic Overview 2010):

• To have an elevated growth by building national presence and acquiring maximum presence in some other parts of world. They have also targeted approximately 40 demographic, which they have intended to attain by streamlining and enhancing the capabilities of their distribution strategies
• To pursue merger & acquisition strategy to reach to some foreign locations
• As of now they are also operating in New Zealand
• Selling services to a wide range of customers with their varied range of innovative products and services
• To support the growth of policy holders and to have their retention for a long term relationships
• Increasing the premium value by selling appropriate products and higher values to their existing policy holders

They can achieve their marketing objectives by adopting the following steps (Lovelock and Patterson 2015):

• Increasing the participation on the online interaction with the customers as it is a good source to reach to a wide number of customers
• Continually incepting innovative thoughts in bringing new range of products & services to the existing customers, which would also help retain them for a longer participation with the company
• Considering M&A in some other parts of world to reach to the new customers. This would also help enhance their market capitalization and the dominance in other parts of world

The Ad agency, which they would approach for their further expansion into the market, they need to build some form of communication with the Ad agency regarding their marketing objectives as this would let them know about the purpose of the advertisement and would also help them know the most appropriate form of advertisement. Following are some of the briefing, which they would have to make to the Ad agency (Moriarty et al. 2014):

• Communicating the exact marketing objectives to the advertising agency
• Communicating the budget as this would decide on the contents of the advertisement
• Communicating the deadline for the set advertisements
• Communicating the selection of advertisement’s mode

Integrated services marketing is the way to conduct an appropriate mixing of different marketing strategies. Following are some of the recommendations for the NIB Company, which they should consider while considering the integrated services marketing (Lovelock and Patterson 2015):

• Proper utilization of media tools
• Consistency in conveying the messages across every selected media channels
• Sales alignment should be as per the business needs, which needs to have a correlation with the set marketing objectives of the NIB Company and the capability of the advertising agency

Following are some of the communications, which are needed to be facilitated with the Advertising agency in order to maintain a proper branding of the products (Rosenbloom 2012):

• Considering the overall business strategy
• Identifying the target clients
• Conducting research on the target customers
• Maintaining the brand positioning
• Maintaining the messaging strategy
• Communicating the content market strategy to the Advertising agency

References

Blankson, C. and Crawford, J.C., 2012. Impact of positioning strategies on service firm performance. Journal of Business research, 65(3), pp.311-316.

Lovelock, C. and Patterson, P., 2015. Services marketing. Pearson Australia.

Moriarty, S., Mitchell, N.D., Wells, W.D., Crawford, R., Brennan, L. and Spence-Stone, R., 2014. Advertising: Principles and practice. Pearson Australia.

NIB Strategic Overview. 2010. 1st ed. [ebook] Available at: https://www.nib.com.au/shareholders/file/nib%20strategic%20overview%20presentation_180610.pdf [Accessed 4 Jun. 2017]

Rosenbloom, B., 2012. Marketing channels. Cengage Learning.

Wilson, R.M. and Gilligan, C., 2012. Strategic marketing management. Routledge.

Wirtz, J. and Lovelock, C., 2016. Services marketing: people, technology, strategy. World Scientific Publishing Co Inc.

Wirtz, J., 2012. Essentials of services marketing. FT Press.