From getting noticed to getting chosen
What a softening market means for the Insurance Marketing Cycle
In the last few years there has been a noticeable improvement in specialty insurance marketing. You could say it’s been a bit like buses: nothing for ages, then they all show up at once…
As someone who has spent years complaining that insurance marketing all looks the same, I should probably be delighted.
I am...mostly.
But it’s a bit more complicated than that, because my question is how effective is all that activity right now, in a softening market?
Simply calling the current environment a ‘soft market’ is a little too neat. In Q2 2026, Marsh reported global commercial insurance rates down 4% overall. But underneath that headline, property was down 12%, cyber 4% and financial and professional lines 3%, while casualty increased 2% globally and 7% in the US.
Different parts of the market are moving at different speeds, but the direction of travel is clear enough, and that changes the question being asked of insurers.
Brokers have moved from “where can I get capacity?” towards “why should I give the business to you?”
There are more insurers willing to write the risk, brokers have more options and clients have more leverage, yet underwriters are of course still being asked to grow.
Suddenly, differentiation matters.
The Insurance Marketing Cycle
I first came up with my Insurance Marketing Cycle in 2025 as a way of thinking about how marketing emphasis should change as insurance market conditions change.
Emphasis is important. The fundamentals of marketing effectiveness don't disappear because the rating environment changes. Binet and Field's long and short-term principles still apply, as does the Ehrenberg-Bass work around mental availability and the 95:5 principle that most of the people we want to influence are not actively buying at any given moment.
What changes through the insurance cycle is where the commercial pressure sits and, therefore, where marketing needs to place greater emphasis. That is why I think some industry players made smart decisions by investing in being remembered when they didn't desperately need to be.
Make hay while the sun shines
When business is coming through the door anyway, why spend money on distinctive assets? Why create big experiential campaigns?
Because memory takes time to build.
And eventually the market changes.
The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute talks about brand assets becoming valuable through repeated and consistent use. You cannot simply buy those associations when you suddenly need them.
Which brings me to Beazley.
The pink. The bowler hat. Insurance. Just different. Game On. And, most recently, Around the World in 80 Years.
Beazley invested in making itself recognisable during a period when insurers could arguably get away without being particularly recognisable. CGI ducks, a pink bus in Chicago, tuk-tuks in Singapore and London cabs adorned with giant pink bowler hats across mainland Europe all created surprise and delight. People noticed them, photographed them and talked about them.
But surprise and delight isn't a sustainable strategy on its own. The value is in using those moments to reinforce brand assets and associations that survive after the surprise has worn off.
A bus is only a bus
I've watched the buses (and taxis) multiply: Beazley, Chubb, Ardonagh, Liberty, QBE…I'm sure there are more.
There is nothing particularly distinctive about a branded vehicle. What made Beazley's buses, taxis and tuk-tuks distinctive was everything that happened around them as part of a much bigger brand experience.
You can copy an execution but you can't retrospectively copy the associations built around it.
If the City eventually fills up with insurance-branded buses, the answer isn't a bigger bus.
Howden understood the assignment
Howden needs a special mention, for a number of reasons. The departure of its marketing lead was one of the catalysts for coming up with the cycle in the first place.
The other is that mural was really bloody beautiful. [1]
Its 2023 global rebrand brought multiple businesses together under one identity, but more importantly Howden kept building. They invested heavily in sport sponsorship but didn’t just slap a logo on it and call it a day.
The ‘Insuring greatness at Royal Ascot 2026’[2] was a genuine work of art, completely fitting for the event it was tied to. With the British & Irish Lions partnership there were the inspiring ‘Behind the Jersey’ interviews and, as a rugby fan, my jaw hit the floor watching the ‘Kicking for Greatness’ 2025 squad announcement mural reveal.
Not only was all the work just genuinely beautiful, the work felt connected. Every time they released something new it was still wholly Howden. That consistency matters because the associations we build around a brand accumulate over time.
Insurance gets more creative
There's some genuinely good creative work appearing across specialty insurance now. I’ve always wanted to do a flash mob[3], so hats off to Liberty Specialty Markets and its High Visibility Coverage campaign.
The hi-vis device has extended into the wider visual identity, giving it the potential to become a recognisable campaign asset. The question is what Liberty does with it next. Does High Visibility Coverage become associated with something meaningful about what a broker or client can expect from Liberty, or does it remain a good visual gag involving fluorescent jackets?
Elsewhere, Hiscox partnered with Specsavers, Weetabix and Cillit Bang to bring copyright infringement to life; Convex became ‘Concave’ for April Fool’s Day and created the Convex Arms; and Chaucer turned We Find a Way into an augmented-reality maze outside Lloyd’s[4].
I am genuinely delighted that, as an industry, we’re becoming more creatively ambitious, but I also worry about marketing’s perennial battle against being seen as the colouring-in department. If these activations exist in isolation, they risk being dismissed as gimmicks when budgets tighten.
In a softening market, attention gets you noticed, but it doesn't necessarily give someone a reason to choose you.
Getting chosen
All of that brand building still matters. We still need mental availability and the distinctive assets we've worked hard to establish. Long-term brand building doesn't disappear because rates are falling.
What has changed is the commercial question. When a broker has several insurers willing to write the risk, being recognised and remembered only gets you so far. Marketing has to help the business explain why someone should choose it.
And this takes me full circle to ‘the boring stuff’, which is what we, as marketers, need to understand and get right.
The actual reason to choose one insurer over another might sit in its claims experience, wordings, risk management capabilities, data, people, service or distribution. It will differ by product, geography and client, which means marketers need to understand the businesses they are marketing in much greater depth.
Follow the growth
One of the dangers as the market softens is that pressure for growth simply turns into pressure for more marketing activity. Suddenly everyone wants a campaign, an event, an email or something on LinkedIn.
We, as marketers, need to understand where the business actually needs to grow and where it has a credible opportunity before deciding what Marketing should do about it. That might mean a campaign, better broker materials, technical content or an account-based programme, but sometimes the right decision will be to put the resource somewhere else entirely.
In that sense, Marketing starts to behave a little more like underwriting. We have finite resources and need to be selective about where we deploy them based on the opportunities most likely to produce the outcome the business wants.
Find the proof points, and understand them
We need to find the evidence behind the proposition and turn it into something brokers and clients can actually use. Doing that properly requires much closer relationships with underwriting, claims and distribution. Marketers need to understand what is happening in the portfolio, what brokers are asking for, why business is being won and lost, and where the opportunities sit.
This is the part of marketing that requires considerably more discipline, but it is also the part that helps us move away from being seen as the colouring-in department and towards being a commercial function.
Measure what is moving
A more competitive market is also likely to bring greater scrutiny of marketing spend, which makes understanding whether any of this is working more important.
Perfect attribution in specialty insurance is a fantasy. Sales cycles are long, buying groups are complicated and relationships play a significant role in how business gets placed. But useful measurement is entirely possible.
We can look at engagement with priority brokers, movement within target accounts, conversion of marketing-supported opportunities, cross-sell and whether the business is becoming better known for the things we actually want it to be known for.
I increasingly think ‘directionally accurate’ is a useful standard. Measure what you can consistently and use it to make better decisions about where marketing resource goes next.
From getting noticed to getting chosen
Insurance marketing has become more colourful, more confident and considerably more interesting, and long may that continue.
Those insurers that invested in building their brands during harder market conditions now have years of recognition and associations to draw on as competition intensifies. Those investing in distinctive campaigns today need to give those ideas enough time and consistency to build the same.
But the challenge facing marketing in a softening market goes much further than visibility. We need to understand where the business can grow, what genuinely makes it worth choosing and how we prove that to the people making the decision.
The brand work shouldn't stop. The long and the short still need to work together, but as the Insurance Cycle turns, the Marketing emphasis changes.
The hard market created an opportunity to become known.
The softening market is when being known has to become commercially useful.
Author: Cara McFadyen, Founder, Ooshka
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