In the recently released WARC Rankings, Income Insurance ranked at no. 34 amongst the top 100 global brands, across all categories.
Amongst financial services brands, it ranked at no. 3. Across all brands in the world!
To set context, it’s worth looking at what the WARC rankings measure.
Income Insurance is Singaporean brand, operating primarily in Singapore. We are a large, well known, loved brand who have a hallowed history of making campaigns that Singaporeans find heartwarming. In recent times, we have created communication that firmly highlights the differentiating factors of our products, while being quite entertaining and also experience driving. Examples of this are Trapped for Travel Insurance, the recent EV launch which features comedians and for which we did Singapore’s first and likely the world’s first “Drive in comedy”, World’s Safest Athlete to highlight that our personal accident plans were an apt Fitness Insurance and finally, helping Singaporeans complete their dreams inspite of life-threatening illness like Cancer, with our Critical Illness campaign. These are campaigns we are proud of, have contributed to business growth and have as a happy consequence, earned external accolades like a WARC APAC Gold and Effie Singapore “Marketer of the year”.
But for this to add up to being no. 34 in the world, is a pleasant shock. It’s especially pertinent as an achievement because we are the only Singaporean brand in the top 50. In the list below, the brand just above us is Mastercard and below us are Netflix and Volkswagen.
Within financial services, we sit in the top 3, just behind ANZ and Mastercard. Having just a fair amount, I can safely say that the business driving work from both these brands is envy-driving.
It's important to understand why this is significant. WARC measures performance across effectiveness awards, globally. It will look at WARC and Effie Global wins, regional wins, local market wins and then put all of these together to arrive at the ranking. It is only rational that the larger global brands, with multi-market presence will dominate this list. Hence, it speaks to the performance of Income in regional WARC awards (where we won an APAC gold) and the scale of its win in local Effies (where we were "Marketer of the year", with 9 metals) that have contributed to our brand making this global list at no. 34.
It’s neither in our brand’s DNA nor in the DNA of the people working for it to gloat about our accolades. It’s a company that focuses squarely on doing what’s best for our policyholders and our business. Our technological advancements, like SNACK, our products that serve the seniors (Silvercare) and children with autism are also created to serve people. We do what’s needed to serve them and get the message out to them; making any media attention outside of it, not a pursuit. We prioritize impact over image. Or put differently, our image is firmly in service of our impact on business and society, in that order.
When a brand has this mindset, its efforts will sometimes go unnoticed. They will be noticed by the people we serve BUT the brand’s impact could be undervalued in the circles of opinion.
Which is why this ranking is a humbling validation. It re-enforces my belief that if, as a team, we put our head down, focus on our business and do what’s right, the work and the effort will get noticed, in the forums that matter.
The fact that we are a Singaporean brand that has put Singapore on this global list of excellence is a happy by-product.
Even the quietest doers need some encouragement, every once in a while. That is the value of this no. 34.
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