Strategic customer relationship marketing and re-intermediation models in the insurance industry

This research uses a case study of a UK car insurance company to investigate the relationships among price aggregator (re-intermediation) purchase channel, purchasing habits, marketing response models, marketing mix variables, business models, and strategic customer relationship marketing. The introduction of aggregators within the industry has changed the UK car insurance environment substantially in terms of the above core aspects. The research explores the following questions. How do the insights map to the particular business contexts of the case company and its drive for sustained growth and profitability? How does re-intermediation relate to strategic marketing planning and implementation via the marketing mix? How can the results help to reposition the case company with regards to its future growth and profitability through an integrated business model? How has the performance of existing distribution channels been affected by the advent of price comparison models? A wide range of statistical models and data mining tools were applied to this research, including vector autoregressive (VAR) modelling, general linear regression, quantile regression, autoregressive, moving average; autoregressive integrated moving average, GARCH, logistic regression; decision trees and neural networks models. The research also uses scenario testing for business model understanding and hypothesis testing for marketing framework. These methods allowed the researcher to better understand the new aggregator enriched environment. By way of main theoretical and practical contributions to knowledge, the study provides an in-depth knowledge of the insurance re-intermediation problem and the construction of an Integrated Business Re-intermediation Model (IBRM) that enhances growth and profitability of company x, and insurance companies in general. This the first to study the effects of reintermedation within the UK car insurance industry which compares the business prospects of the case car insurance company pre- and post-joining an aggregator. The analyses show that price aggregator channel significantly interact with other channels in influencing the customer retention rates and life time values available to the company and hence its future growth and profitability. Insights from the IBRM model could be used to develop the car insurance and related businesses further.