Research On Agency Channel Marketing Strategy Of M Life Sichuan Branch

The past 30 years has witnessed a vigorous growth in China’s life insurance industry,which has become the world’s second largest insurance market after the United States,with life insurance premium income of 3.12 trillion yuan in 2021 and the number of life insurance companies reaching 91.The large-scale expansion and extensive growth of the industry in the early stage have posed potential risks to the sustainable and healthy development of the industry.Since 2017,a series of regulatory policies has been issued on increasing the proportion of security insurance,limiting the sales of short-and medium-term wealth management insurance,guiding the industry get back to the basic of risk prevention.As a result,growth of life insurance industry declined to single digits.Since 2020,the shock of COVID-19 pandemic has added downward pressure on economic growth.Due to the persisting uncertainty,domestic consumption declined significantly,and life insurance demand was restrained.Under this situation,the agent workforce,which normally contributes more than 50% of the life insurance gross written premiums also faces major challenges: face to face sales was interrupted,people became more cautious and prudent about expenditure,in consequence,average productivity declined and staff turnover surged due to income cut.The former tactic of "mass recruiting and selling" is not able to promote industry growth anymore,transformation is imperative for development.M Life Insurance Company established 17 years ago and gradually formed multidimensional channels including agency channel,bank partners,and direct & digital marketing.Agency channel,which makes main contribution to company’s business,enjoys high reputation for its high-standard talent sourcing,systematic training and high average productivity among its peers.However,since the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic,the company’s agency channel has been suffered from sliding business indicators,brain drain,falling service standards,and sluggish growth due to multiple internal and external factors.Based on the 7Ps marketing mix theory,this thesis takes agency channel marketing strategy of M Life Sichuan Branch as the research object,aiming at its current hardship.Firstly,the thesis obtains a large amount of second-hand information through desk research to analyze its marketing environment from aspects of company profile,current situation of agency channel,Sichuan life insurance market development and main competitors.Through the 7Ps theory,it evaluates the current marketing strategy status of the channel to identify the problems those may exist;Then,more first-hand data is obtained through marketing research.In-depth interview with the channel executives is carried out to summarize the problems and to dig deep into the reasons behind.Besides,questionnaire survey is conducted on stock customers to sort out customer profiles,to know more about their needs and purchasing behavior,and to evaluate the satisfaction degree on agency channel’s service of M Life Sichuan Branch.Finally,it puts forward suggestions on improving marketing strategies so as to help the company’s agency channel out of the predicament of low customer loyalty and weak growth.At the same time,it also hopes to throw some light on marketing strategy optimization for foreign life insurance companies of the same scale.