How To Redefine Your Brand With Tory Pachis, CMO of Amica Insurance | Ep. 419

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0:21Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up. Welcome back to another episode of the Marketing Millennials. Today I have Torrey Pakes, the CMO and EVP of Amica Insurance. Excited to chat today. Tori has been in the insurance game for a while, and I'm excited to pick his brain. And they've been doing some cool sports marketing thing. And I'm on a sports marketing kick right now with some of my guests.

1:08So I'm excited to talk about sports marketing. But I want to give you a chance to introduce yourself. How did you get into marketing, the insurance industry? And then we'll get into the combo today. Yeah, thanks, Daniel. It's great to be here. And, you know, as a Gen Xer, I'm excited to be invited to a millennial podcast. um yeah thanks thanks for having me my name is tory packets as you said i'm the chief marketing and growth officer here at amika insurance i'm approaching my sixth year anniversary here at the company but a total of 27 years in the insurance industry having worked at fine companies like travelers insurance and hanover insurance as well um started my career in the late 90s, graduating from University of Connecticut.

1:56Go Huskies. And I wanted to be a journalist. I feel bad for you though. Because I mean, you lost the national championship. But that's that. Well, at least we got there and we've got five more that we can relish. So I went back to grad school at UConn and studied marketing communications and was fortunate enough to be accepted into a leadership development program at Travelers where really a 27-year career all started. Yeah, I want to go into the first thing. I know you said you came six years ago, so like 2020 to Amika. And I know that you essentially had very low brand awareness when you came in there at the company.

2:40Could you walk me through, what are some things you thought about to put Amika on the map and start building the brand presence? When I arrived in July 2020 in the middle of the pandemic, one of the first questions to my team was, what does our brand tracker show in terms of awareness and consideration? And that's where I quickly learned, A, we didn't have a brand tracker in place, but B, most of our media was in lower funnel performance marketing channels, primarily in direct mail. we were a virtually a direct mail only company and when i told many of my my friends in the industry that i was joining amica they called me the mailman for the first six months that i i came here because of the amount of mail and how dependent we were on that channel and i will say direct mail still an important channel for us and for the category but it was really important that we balanced out you know the performance marketing channels with brand building.

3:45Um, so we quickly stood up a brand tracker and that's where we learned that our unaided awareness was about 2 % countrywide. Um, and you know, that's, that's challenging for 120 year old company to learn that, you know, less than 2 % of America is aware of you, um, shows great opportunity ahead, but also makes you wonder like, what, what is it that we, we need to do now? um so and and you know why it's really important in our category too is there's a direct relationship between awareness and how often a brand is quoted and we see that's why we continue to see you know the top five companies in our category invest more and more in advertising because there is that direct correlation between brand and quote rate.

4:41So we increased our marketing budget. We found balance between brand and demand channels. We introduced 30 new media channels to our portfolio. And it's been a journey over the last five years of really building brand and consideration, but also policy growth at the lower end of the funnel. I think it's super cool that, I mean, like the first 90 years, first you stayed in business 90 years just from referrals, which is probably unheard of to do just like, like zero, pretty much zero marketing. The only marketing is word of mouth people, your customers doing that, which is pretty hard to do. And then you decided to do some channels like direct mail.

5:25And now you're doing other channels. I think that shows that it's a heritage brand if customers are referring. Because that's probably one of your best channels still, is those customers telling other people about the policy. But I also want to go into one of the biggest things you did recently and the biggest channels you've invested in is building this sports marketing ecosystem. So how did you connect cultural impact with measurable ROI, not just awareness with your partnerships with the Celtics? Yeah, in in 2022, we started our one of our first sports marketing investments. And locally here in Rhode Island, it was for the naming rights of the Amica Mutual Pavilion, formerly known as the Dunkin Donuts Center.

6:20it's uh it's rhode island's largest um sort of coliseum where it sits 15 16 000 it's where the providence college friars play and it's a hub for you know annually over a million you know affluent families in the area to come together and um first move was to put our our name on the building which was uh tremendous in terms of building brand awareness but also a commitment to the city where we were founded in 119 years ago. It was also assigned to the local communities, the nonprofits that we support and our employees that were here to stay and were committed to this market. From there came an incredible opportunity after the 2024-25 season to put our name on the jersey patch of the Boston Celtics.

7:17And you're absolutely right. At first it started as a brand awareness play. And I think one of our challenges as marketers always will continue to be, how do you translate marketing metrics, vanity metrics, some might call it, like awareness, consideration, impressions, media value, to actual business value that a CEO, a CFO, a board of directors can understand. You know, what does this mean in terms of revenue, in terms of market share growth? So admittedly, you know, we're still on that journey. Year one of the Jersey patch was very much building awareness, letting more people know who Amika is.

8:08And we've seen our awareness and consideration numbers hit all-time high in the New England markets. Year two, now that we just wrapped up, you know, the second season of the Jersey patch has been to demonstrate how is this translating to, like I said, revenue growth. And that's where we're looking at things like how many unique visitors from, you know, the Celtics are we bringing to amika.com or Celtics related landing pages? How deep are they going into the funnel? how many season ticket holders are we able to issue a policy for, right, to show lower funnel growth? And ultimately, you know, what is our market share growth and revenue look like in the states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, you know, New England, where we continue to invest?

8:58And that's where we've seen some significant growth as a result of this investment with the Celtics. So when you got the, like one way I see people measuring the stuff as like if you did the Rhode Island naming rights of their stadium, did you see like quotes going up in Rhode Island as a direct correlation of like naming that stadium? Is that like one of the things you were looking at that in Rhode Island quotes went up when we named the stadium after Amika? Yeah. I mean, as you know, attribution can be really tough with a lot of these programs and, you know, the naming rights and the Jersey patch are one of many investments that Amica is making as a whole, you know, in terms of pricing improvements, digital improvements.

9:51There's a lot of enhancements that are working all together. But what I can tell you is, you know, when you start to see a pre post impact on upper funnel metrics like awareness consideration, when you start to see a measurable difference in brand attributes, like how your brand is perceived. and then you start to see it translate into incremental policy growth and revenue growth you can certainly point to these brand investments as having a big big impact in you know lower funnel sales and revenue yeah i mean just like thinking of me as a consumer the the two ways i ever think about insurance is one like i asked my friends and family what insurance do you have for x y and z or two i've seen an advertising some advertisement somewhere that is about that insurance those are good two ways i'm not really going to go search the internet to find the best policy because it's there's so much especially someone when i was looking insurance back in the day i had so low i didn't even know what insurance was like what i can get with insurance I didn't know my education level was so low so my only thing is like I heard this ad once or my my father-in-law my my mother or someone else's using a policy maybe I should check it out so I totally understand like the brand awareness pay play in the insurance industry yeah I mean it's a it's a low engagement category it's purchased at a fairly low frequency.

11:32It's not something you buy every month. So for that reason, I think that's one of the reasons why you see brands invest so much in awareness because you need to be mentally available for the consumer when they are in that shopping and buying mode. You know, one thing, one other sort of leading indicator for all this, you know, you mentioned Google searching for a product and, And, you know, in our category, generic keywords, auto, home, life insurance are very expensive because there's so many companies that are competing and bidding against each other for those generic keywords. But if you get a consumer to search on your brand keyword, it's a fraction of the cost of a generic keyword.

12:19In fact, of all of our channels, it's the most efficient. So for that reason, there's a lot of benefit to having the consumer know that Amica is an insurance provider, that they sell auto home and life insurance and search directly for Amica, either from our website or search engine. and i i one question i have too is i mean i know you're balancing that 100 plus year heritage um and now there's like a pretty new generation of consumers out there so how like the partnership with a sports obsessed city like boston uh shape how you both for both long time and next gen audiences like how does it you balance both those audience with that partnership yeah Yeah, I think, you know, one of the reasons why we partnered with the Celtics was was much more than just building awareness and consideration.

13:17One of our other business objectives was to connect with a younger consumer and a younger audience, specifically in the New England market. You know, our average customer tenure years ago was about 65 years old, which is great. You know, it's probably one of the reasons why we relied so heavily on direct mail as an acquisition channel. But one of our objectives is how do you connect with a younger consumer, which allows you to build, you know, lifetime value over a longer span. So for that reason, you know, you think of the NBA, you think of sports. Half of the NBA audience is under the age of 35.

14:03It's one of the fastest growing sports and allows you to do more sort of creative, emotive storytelling and connect with the players and tell their stories as well. I think young people are interested in brands, you know, for what's the what's the greater purpose behind it? What does this brand stand for? When I purchase from this company, what does it mean for me? And, you know, one of our driving forces behind the Celtics partnership was what we can do in the community as well. More purpose-driven marketing and storytelling. We had a saying as a team when we launched this that we want this patch to be more than just sports page news.

14:52We want it to be front page news. So I'll give you one example of that. We quickly partnered with the Boston Celtics Shamrock Foundation, which is their nonprofit. And we connected the Amica Companies Foundation, which is our nonprofit. And they educated us on one of the biggest needs in the New England community in the greater Boston Providence area, which is early childhood education. That there's a lack of seats for young people. It's expensive. and there aren't enough teachers or facilities for these young people and how the ages of essentially zero to five are some of the most important years of a human's development and can be very predictive of future success.

15:39So we are partnering and combining, contributing 2.5 million from the Amica Companies Foundation. They're matching that at 2.5 million for a total of five to build early education, childhood early education centers in the greater Boston and Providence area. We just broke ground on one in the Manton Heights area of Providence. We're starting to do grants for teachers as well. And, you know, again, this is how we extend beyond the patch into more community and purpose-driven marketing. We also use, you know, because we don't have agents as distribution, we use any hospitality opportunity to involve our nonprofits.

16:26So Make-A-Wish, you know, has been involved in other nonprofits in the area where they get to meet players or sit courtside for a game or do the game ball delivery. And that's gone a long way to really telling the Amiga story and what we stand for while borrowing the equity from, you know, the Boston Celtics. Nobody designs bad marketing ops on purpose. You just wake up two years in and all your approvals are on email, your assets are in three apps, your Slack is a maze, and your Mondays are like one long status meeting. Wrike is how you dig yourself out. It's a smart work management platform with visual collaboration, AI that catches deadline risks before they even happen, and the structure to let you focus on the real work.

17:13Integrates with everything, aligns everyone. Used by teams at Lyft, Ogilvy, NVIDIA. Go to ryke.com slash TMM to see how. So, I mean, I love the purpose-driven marketing. And you also said earlier that part of this partnership was not only to go deeper with the athletes involved in the boss, like the Celtics. So I know you did that campaign Back to Zero with Jason Tatum. So what was the core idea of that campaign? How did you make it feel authentic to the Celtic culture rather than just like sponsoring another athlete? yeah i think i think one of the mistakes that brands make is you know just the standard logo slap on you know on a jersey or in the stadium or on an advertisement and and assuming that's going to get you you know the results that you're you're looking for and it was very important for for us day one that we really connect our brand values and our approach to a motive storytelling in our creative, which by the way, is very different from what you see in the insurance category, which is anchored to humor as a vehicle.

18:36We made a conscious decision that we're going to we're going to go the opposite way and really focus on humanity, empathy, and the customer centricity that we're known for as a company. We signed on with Jason Tatum as separately in a separate deal to the Boston Celtics jersey patch. And one of the reasons for that is we thought we you could do a little bit more storytelling with a player's following and authority and endorsement behind it. The NBA also has rules around how you can talk about your sponsorship with the Celtics. We're confined to a 150-mile radius around TD Garden, where they play their games.

19:26That's why most of our Celtics-related advertising airs on NBC Sports Boston, which is in that regional area. However, if you sign with a player, you can advertise nationally or internationally because it's a separate agreement with that player. And that's one of the reasons why we also partnered with Jason. We did a lot of research on Jason. We got to know him, his values, his approach to the game, how he thinks about legacy and responsibility. And we saw alignment with Amika's values as well. Back to Zero is a campaign. and I don't know if you know this, Daniel, but today, I don't know when this will air, but today is May 12th.

20:06And the reason why that's significant is one year ago to this day, Jason tore his Achilles in game, I think it was game four of the Eastern Conference semifinals in Madison Square Garden to the day. And I remember that night watching the game with the team in New York City and the next day thinking to ourselves, oh my God, our brand partner is out for the foreseeable future. What do we do? And that's when we quickly huddled with our advertising agency and realized, hang on a minute, this is an opportunity to tell a story or be part of a comeback. And that's what insurance is, right? Insurance steps in and helps people when they've suffered a setback.

20:55and we worked with Jason and his agency and his team on being part of that that story so back to zero is significant because he wears the number zero and it's also symbolic of starting from scratch after you've had a loss and we recorded that campaign you know over the span of 300 days and his comeback journey, his remarkable comeback journey in less than nine months. And, you know, another aspect to the storytelling was it's not just the athlete that's part of a comeback. It's the team behind him or her that's part of that comeback as well. So we did a lot of content with his mother, who's a big part of his life, with his trainer who helped him, you know, get back on the court, even with his barber that he's had since childhood, because they were all part of the network and small team behind his comeback.

21:52And we saw so much alignment between Jason's story and what Amica does when our policyholders also have a setback. You know, we're part of their team when their house burns down or when they have a car accident. And we help them get back to zero as well. The campaign, as I'm sure many saw, you know, especially in the Boston area, we had out-of-home advertisements. that really launched the week where he announced he was coming back. When he did confirm he was going to play on that game on Friday and early March, all of the out-of-home transition to a countdown clock to when he would take the court.

22:32We partnered with the Celtics to put T-shirts on every seat in the stadium back to zero. We created a television advertising campaign. every employee at amica received a t-shirt and they were encouraged through social to show their own zeros in different ways and um so it was really like one of our first brand activations and an incredible way to align employees communities and and the celtics as well yeah i think i mean i love how you i mean the two things that i love about one thing about like partnerships is like the alignment of values which i think that's like one of the most important things is like does that athlete does that team align with the values of my organization and then two i think where people don't go as deep as that storytelling aspect of you have to align your story with their story and tell it in a way that's vulnerable authentic and then bringing in all the like you said, bring in all that, their community.

23:35I think those two things are, are very important, but I also know you've, I know you've said this in the past, but like, um, a lot of things, especially in like the insurance industry are measured on goosebumps before they measured on data. Um, so how, how do you, for the marketers out there who are like, Oh no, like, How do you go to your CFO or to a leader and say, hey, we need to measure this on goosebumps first before we measure the data of it? Yeah, I mean, you've probably heard me say that we measure our creative on goosebumps or maybe even sometimes a tear of joy or happiness. But I just firmly believe that advertising, especially in the insurance category, doesn't need to be humorous all the time.

24:37There's a place for humor. And I think along the way, many brands have found the linkage between humor and recall, brand recall. But I also believe that there's something to just being authentic to who you are as a brand and not trying to be something that you're not. one of the first moves I made as CMO here was we took price messaging out of our advertising completely because we are not the cheapest on the street. You know, the level of service and white glove claim service we provide comes with a more premium price. And I think, you know, your message externally has to align with the value proposition that's core to you.

25:16um so yeah i mean a lot of our our advertising starts with the premise of does it make you feel something and and i think in a way i'm a big fan of behavioral economics and psychology and i think in a way that's that's how you can connect with the the system one you know thinking uh of of many people and when you're a challenger brand like us you know it helps you stand out in a sea of of sameness. So how do you go to the CFO and convince them of that? I'm still learning along the way of how to do that. But, you know, for me, my approach has always been to sort of create that burning platform, you know, to, to show here's where we are today, benchmarked against the industry, you know, starting with some of those awareness numbers five years ago, here's the linkage between brand investments and sales and revenue growth.

26:13And here's how we estimate a return on investment for you. You got to think like a CFO too, right? They're trying to judge where can my capital deliver a better return. And if they can put it in the market and deliver net investment income in one area, you have to show how an investment in marketing can outperform and help you do, you know, become a good financial investment as well. So, yeah, we take great pride in our advertising. We've got a fantastic ad agency called Mother out in Brooklyn. And we chose them for that reason because we believe their creative storytelling is really unique and emotive in nature.

26:58And it's done well for us. You know, our brand platform, Empathy is our best policy. has not only done a good job of carving out some unique space in the category externally, but it's been sort of a rallying cry for our employees as well. I know we haven't, I mean, we touched on at the beginning that you said, I mean, when you first arrived, it was around like 2 % awareness. What are you at today as like, since like you've been launching all these like brand awareness, as you've done all these media attendance, how has that number scaled up? I will tell you, the number I first shared, 2%, was unaided awareness.

27:42Our total awareness now is over 70 % in our target markets. Consideration is a high over 40 % as well. I mean, you're talking about a brand that only policyholders knew of to now, you know, more consumers are aware of Amica and considering us. And, you know, I think we're just getting started in our journey. There are so many investments we're making in artificial intelligence. I'm kind of surprised those two letters, AI, haven't come up yet. In digital, we're making, you know, investments, and we're going to continue in brand. And that's where I think, you know, we're going to start to see the impact of these investments over the next few years.

28:28Yeah, I was actually going to ask you the question earlier because we talked about a little bit of how, okay, some people hear about top of mind awareness. But I do think now that AI has came in the picture. People are probably using it as a better or more of a research partner to find insurance. um um so how are you like what are some like things you're doing to make sure you show up in like the chat bots the lms that amika is like um one of those brands mentioned when they say like i'm looking for a car insurance in rhode island or i'm looking auto insurance in rhode island what are the how do how do you show up in that yeah we're we're starting to see the impact of LLMs on our site visits.

29:25And that's another area that we're investing quite a bit in. And starting with a complete website redesign to make sure the sort of architecture is in the right place, that we have the right tools to measure, you know, LLM traffic from human traffic, that we have a content strategy that makes sense and is aligned with the LLMs are searching on. So there's a lot of efforts underway right now to help us. We haven't seen a huge decline in web traffic, at least not as much as what I hear from maybe some other companies. I think one other unique thing about Amika, because we have so much customer loyalty and advocacy, it's not uncommon to go to Reddit or Trustpilot and see organic consumer stories and reviews in a very positive nature about our company.

30:23And as you know, the LLMs really favor that user-generated, authentic content. and it's allowed us to sort of punch above our weight, you know, given how dependent LLM search is on Reddit, Trustpilot, and even YouTube. So, you know, we're going to continue leveraging that user-generated content and our customer advocacy as a factor in helping us prepare for the future as well. Well, I'll just tell you one thing. I mean, during this, right now, during this call, I searched like best car insurance in Rhode Island and Boston. And number one was Amica recommended. So that's a good sign that those two partnerships are working very well.

31:12So the number one on the chat, which is pretty cool. And then they said exactly what you said, like Amica is the best for customer service, best for home and auto bundling. and in Boston, it's number one, which is cool to see as well. Just letting you know that I just did that. Yeah, there you go. And that comes from the record number of awards we've won for customer service and satisfaction as well as the user-generated content as well. I mean, it seems like also like, have you done anything with like NerdWallet or anything like that? Because that's where it's like pulling things from. Like NerdWallet is like one of the things that is what they're referencing to make sure that you're not born there.

31:57We have a lot of initiatives underway with different partners, Trustpilot, NerdWallet, Reddit, to really develop a strategy around that. I know you talked about it a little bit and we've talked about it a couple of times about values, but when you're like evaluating your sports partnerships, what is the number one thing you're looking for? Is it the culture of it? Is it a content potential or is it performance? And how do you balance those priorities? Well, that's a good question. I don't want to give you a cop-out. I'd say all of the above. All of them are really important. But I do think you need to start with the brand values, right?

32:37If you jump to performance and you have two organizations that aren't connected from a value standpoint, then it's not authentic, right? So you have to start with, in my opinion, you have to start with an alignment of values. Essentially, you're borrowing equity from a partner. Us being on the patch of the Boston Celtics next to the Nike logo of the 18-time world champion Celtics, you're borrowing equity from that organization. And you have two organizations that call New England home, that have a tremendous rich heritage, that have loyal fans, and that are really proud of their commitment to employees and communities.

33:33And I think you have to start there. This partnership wouldn't have worked, you know, if we, I don't know, making it up, partnered with the Memphis Grizzlies or something, if those alignment, that brand alignment wasn't there. But you start with that, the values, and then that gives you permission, you know, to work lower funnel, do the storytelling, the authentic storytelling, and even get into the lower funnel performance marketing side of it. I also want to go to one thing that I have a question. It's very serious because I know you also, when you're not a CMO, you, I'm not wrong, you also like coach youth basketball.