Harnessing the power of ESG in the quest for customer loyalty.
‘We’ve always valued the quality of insight provided by Motif who have made a great effort to get to know our business, our ambitions and our culture and tailor insight around these to ensure they are relevant and impactful.’
— NEIL COSTLEY Head of Research, Royal London
Royal London has focused on building a strong brand and an excellent customer experience – the ideal foundation for loyalty. The next step was to measure the impact of the company’s Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) activity, ensuring that the leadership it shows in driving the ESG agenda makes a powerful contribution to Royal London’s brand magnetism and long-term growth.
THE CHALLENGE
Royal London is the UK’s largest mutual life, pensions, and investments company, with a commitment to act and invest responsibly. This means challenging and influencing companies on behalf of customers on issues such as CO2 emissions, modern slavery policies, gender balance on the board – and even executive pay.
This goes beyond the simple commercialisation of customer interest. The organisation must also be on the front foot with its customers, keeping them well-informed about the importance of the ESG agenda. Royal London needs to understand their customers’ awareness and knowledge of ESG, and the ways they might improve their engagement with it.
OUR SOLUTION
In 2021, Royal London decided to refresh its core customer research programme. Given its high-profile status within the organisation, insight on ESG had to be sharp and actionable. The elevation of these critical brand perceptions - associated with Motif’s ‘Magnetism’ Loyalty Building Block - ensures stakeholders across the organisation remain switched on to customer awareness and engagement with ESG.
BUSINESS IMPACT
This enabled the business to identify groups where awareness of ESG activity were relatively low, leading to recommendations for a programme of customer engagement supported by channel-specific marketing.
Actions and opportunities continue to include quick wins, which can be implemented immediately, and more ambitious longer-term focus areas that will take time to achieve. Working in partnership with Royal London, Motif has been able to make recommendations designed to have the greatest impact, based on a greater understanding of customer awareness of ESG - and identify new ways to inspire engagement with the agenda.
Wondering about how to build loyalty for your brand? Asking yourself if there are other approaches out there to use insight to better predict business outcomes? Please get in touch to find out more!