Developing Storylines that Differentiate

MetLife is one of the world’s leading financial services companies, providing insurance, annuities, employee benefits, and asset management to help its individuals and institutional customers navigate a changing world. I partnered with MetLife’s Regional Business Customer Marketing (RBCM) team, responsible for marketing employee benefits and wellness plans to companies around the country, to develop a messaging system and personalized narratives that communicated key values and differentiators to employers and small business owners.

The MetLife team was looking to revitalize its messaging architecture and identify core themes that would inform the development of compelling narratives. MetLife believed its current messaging was too corporate and didn’t reflect the human-first characteristics required to stand out from its competitors.

Although MetLife had plenty of ideas on what these themes should be, it struggled to prioritize which would be the most impactful and resonate with its target audiences, and how these should translate into different marketing materials to enable sales.

After reviewing MetLife’s existing messaging and marketing materials and analyzing the challenges of its target audiences, we honed in on three priority themes: agility, innovation, and shared values. Taking these themes, we developed a survey for the RBCM team to gain additional perspectives that dove deeper into the meaning of each.

With the research complete, we started writing the three storylines and supporting messaging systems and provided recommendations on how they could be applied to sales enablement content, such as personalized presentations and videos, sales scripts, and website copy.