Thursday 1 November 2018


Marketing strategy for a product/service case study; Sanlam/Santam Insurance 

Abstract
This paper is intend to analyze insurance as a product offer by Santam Insurance a subsidiary of Sanlam a South African financial services group.  In this paper we will look at a brief background of the company and its products. The current marketing strategies of Sanlam/Santam it objectives, target segments(s), value proposition and the marketing mix implementation. Furthermore we will diagnose the current marketing strategy and implementation. Finally we shall prescript solutions to the short comings that will be found during our analysis of the current marketing strategy and implementation.

    Insurance is a means of protection from financial loss. It is a form of risk management, primarily used to hedge against the risk of a contingent or uncertain loss. The insurance industry is divided into two categories; -Accident and health companies are probably the most well-known, -Property and casualty companies insure against accidents of non-physical harm (Brian, 2018). Satam insurance a subsidiary of Salam finance is our case study, the case study will enable us to analyze it current market strategy focusing on Africa where she recently acquired one of Africa’s bigger insurers Saham Assurance. This gives Salam a bigger global coverage of 41 countries with 33 from the African continent.   
   In December 1917, a small group of Afrikaners and a Scotsman met in the Royal Hotel in Cape Town to discuss the formation of a company which would later prove to have a major impact on South Africa's economic history. The Suid-Afrikaanse Nasionale Trust en Assuransie Maatskappij Beperk (South African National Trust and Assurance Company Limited), Santam, was registered on 28 March 1918. Today, Sanlam is a diversified financial services provider with an extensive product offering catering for all market segments. The Group has consistently grown its local as well as an international footprint (Sanlam, 2018).
   Santam is a subsidiary of Sanlam who in October 11, 2018 acquires 100% of the capital of Saham Finances; her acquisition deepens Sanlam’s direct presence in 33 countries in Africa stretching from the Cape to the Maghreb and East and West Africa and 41 globally, giving it unmatched access to the continent’s insurance market. Also Sanlam is present in India, Malaysia, Philippines, the UK /Ireland, the US, Switzerland and Australia (Sanlam, 2018).
      Between 2010 and 2015, Santam invested significantly in new technology enablers to assist the commercial and personal business in realizing its strategy. An analysis of the benefits delivered by these projects includes: − Optimizing the commercial lines contact centre’s structures, processes and technology (an investment of R100 million) achieved improved productivity through the reduction of headcount even though the volume of transactions has increased by 21% since 2013. − Establishing a new technology foundation and the optimization of online interaction channels for employees, intermediaries and clients over a period of five years at a cost of R95 million. The main benefit is reduced call volumes and the ability to maintain service level agreements (SLAs).
   In other for Sanlam to implement the Santam product’s current marketing strategy Sanlam technically base its implementation on the 4 P’s of marketing Place, price, product and promotion. In implementing the place or coverage in October 2018 acquire Saham insurance to expand its market to francophone Africa given a Santam direct presence in 33 countries in Africa and 41 globally. Santam tailored it prices to suit the African market that is why it has little or no resistance from its clients on the cost of it insurance products while follow strict regulations. 
    In the light of product Santam offers benefits under short-term policies, which include engineering, guarantee, liability, miscellaneous, motor, accident and health, property, transportation, and crop policies, and contracts that could comprise a combination of various insurance covers. The company also provides alternative risk transfer; long-term insurance consisting of funeral policies; and cell captive facilities through Centric Insurance.
  Santam uses promotion techniques such as: advertising, public relations, social media marketing, email marketing, search engine marketing, video marketing and more. Each touch point is supported by a well positioned product to truly maximize return on investment. Santam also work with many service providers that offer exclusive discounts on services that will improve the safety and security to its clients, their family and possessions.
   Looking at the Sanlam current product Santam evaluation, the product’s current marketing strategy and implementation is promising in the Africa market looking at it coverage. The acquisition of Saham Finance expands it foot print to Sub Saharan Africa and the Maghreb zone increasing it present in 41 countries in total. The Group has a direct stake in operations based in South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Mauritius, Malawi, Zambia, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, India, Malaysia and the United Kingdom and has business interests in the USA, Australia, Burundi, Lesotho and the Philippines. Following the acquisition of the SAHAM Finances Group, it has exposure to insurance operations in Morocco, Angola, Algeria, Tunisia, Niger, Mali, Senegal, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Cote D’Ivoire, Togo, Benin, Cameroon, Gabon, Republic of the Congo, Madagascar, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. (Saham Finanace, 2018).
  
     Santam is South Africa’s leading general insurer with a market share in excess of 22%. Listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE), the Santam group provides a diversified range of general insurance products and services in Southern Africa and internationally through a network of 3600 intermediaries and direct channels. Now Sanlam taking over Saham finance who in turn acquired Colina Insurance who was one of the leading Life insurers in Africa is good business strategy for Sanlam/ Santam for the future.
    With this great vision and expansion Sanlam/Santam has for Africa and the globe I have noticed for now one business difficult to be face by their expansion and that is exploiting the African market to it totality. It is true Africa has the fastest growing population and great business opportunities, off course there is the need for insurance services, the question is; at what price and cost looking at the realities doing business in the African continent. The solution to this is for Santam/Sanlam dive very quickly into micro insurance products for the African continent. The term "micro insurance” typically refers to insurance services offered primarily to clients with low income and limited access to mainstream insurance services and other means of effectively coping with risk (Micro Insurance Network, n.d.).
    To conclude, it is eminent that at 100 years of Satam/Salam existence it has emerged as a global brand as she has grabbed a bigger share of the insurance marketing in Africa. This is through the acquisition of Saham Assurance and working with more than 3600 service companies in the provision of the services to the African continent and the world at large. None there less developing a more tailored insurance product to the African continent to meet up with the financial capacity of the African man will be a plus to the growth of Satam/Salam.

References
Sanlam, (October 29, 2018). About our history.
Saham Finanace, (October11, 2018). All systems go for major Sanlam Emerging Markets deal.
Micro Insurance Network, (n.d.). Key concepts
Brian, B. (July 25, 2018). How does the insurance sector work? Investopedia.
Annexes


Wednesday 19 March 2014

The concept of knowledge sharing in organisations; Understanding Modern Business and Organisation



 Learning organisation: The place of knowledge sharing - Video Transcript

This time I would like to tell you about the learning organisations. Many would agree that the most important asset of the organisation today is the knowledge of their employees. So what do they do about it?

Tom Davenport and Larry Prusak went to many com panies, and sometimes they have seen the coffee machines. And they have found a note next to the coffee machine, work, don't talk. Don't spend any time here at the coffee machine, chatting to your colleagues. Go back to your office, sit down, and work.

I said, this is the worst thing you can do about organisational learning. What you should do encourage people.

 You have knowledge workers. They are interested in working better. Encourage
them to talk. They will talk about how to do a better job, because they are interested in it. They want to do it.

If they don't want to do it, create an environment in which they do want to do it. So they were, for example, advising a company on how to set up a completely new plant. They said, the best, most central locat ion should be a coffee shop. You make excellent coffee and you encourage your employees to spend time there, and they will work better.

So why is there this kind of discrepancy between how we approach it? It is because we don't really understand knowledge and learning. So I would like to see how you achieve that kind ofenvironment, where you can say, let smart people talk.

What I want to talk about is the knowledge orientation of an organisation. So I'm not talking bout those organisations which I call the ignorant one's in the previous slide so who don't care about knowledge. They will die out anyway. So it is not important to consider them.

But once you focus on knowledge, what is it that you put into the focus really? What is the focalvalue? Say that it is knowledge. That's the most obvious thing.OK, what will happen if the knowledge is in the focus, if the knowledge is the most important value? If I have knowledge, and my organisation values knowledge in itself, what I will do I will keep it for myself. Not give it to anyone, because I am more valuable if only I have it. So that is actually towards the right direction, but then it stops and goes completely wrong.

So Tom Davenport and Larry Prusak suggested that there is another level. You should focus on knowledge sharing. Encourage people to share knowledge. That's all the coffee machine metaphor's all about.

What happens if you do that? What I will do if I have knowledge, I will start teaching others. Let's get a bit closer to that. I think that they are still wrong.

I had an exam when I was a student, where the professor came into the classroom. It was a written exam. He gave what we need to work on, and then he left the room.

He came back only about 40 minutes later, and he said, you know, while you were here alone, I was over there, in the other building, and I was watching you through the window. Of course, we started laughing. That cannot be really true. Actually, it was. We realised that then he went to the first student. He said, I have seen that they were asking most questions from you. And here is you get the highest mark. It was 5 in that system.

Then he said, OK. He might have really done that. And what he did then--he went to the other guy. He says, OK, I have seen that you were asking most of the questions. Come, I will ask you a couple of questions. Lie, immediate fail.

So what happens in this approach. You are rewarding the person who wants to share their
knowledge, but you are punishing the one who wants to learn. Of course, the exam is not the right moment to learn.

But in an organisation, you need to reward the knowledge increase. That's how you can achievehigh levels of people wanting to learn all the time and doing it and so on. That is where you can get if you are focusing on knowledge increase.

Now, what is it when we say that organisations learn? But it doesn't make any sense. Organisations do not have knowledge.

The knowledge of the organisation is the knowledge of the employees, which is in between theirears. So how can organisations learn? First of all, there is something else--not only the knowledge of the employees. Because from the interaction of the employees, additional knowledge may result.

And there is also quite a lot of knowledge embedded in the organisational processes of roducingsomething. Of course, those processes cannot learn unless there are those people who designthem who can learn more and that way improve the processes. But it means that we can try todevelop the organisational context in a way that it responds to environmental challenges by learning.

What would be the first level? Thefirst level is that we notice that there is something wrong

with the action. The consequences are wrong. For example, it is--the manufacturing process is producing lots of rejects. What do we do? We fix the malfunction. And the same process that was there before will work better.

Or we can go beyond that, and we can decide that actually, we need to improve the whole process. We need to change the process, or we need to change what we are measuring about the process and so on. This is called double-loop learning. And this is already what most authors will identify with a learning organisation.

But actually, you should go a bit further than that. There is a possibility to revise the whole context--where are you, what are you about? For example, most people were thinking about IBM as the biggest computer manufacturer a couple of years ago. What is IBM today?

IBM today is a huge consulting company, a solution provider, and so on. So they reinvented
themselves. It is a different context in which they are operating today.

So what Peter Senge says is that the essence of the learning organisation is that it is a place where people learn together all the time, and they learn about how to learn even better together. And they say that it is the only way to be competitive in today's environment. Now, there is a specific notion. It is called Communities of Practice, which I see is the way of having all of this happening.

So we have the organisation. And then we have these individuals in and also outside the
organisation. They have their own knowledge, and they interacting in multiple ways. And together, they make sense about things.

Now this entity, where this making sense about things together, sharing knowledge, learning
together, joining our minds, this is called the Community of Practice. What is very important is that it is the nature of knowledge that it is sticky and leaky. It sticks to the practice. It sticks to those annoying processes that people perform, and it leaks through organisational boundaries. It does not have any respect for the organisation.

Now, unless your organisation can accept that some of this learning is occurring beyond their boundaries and control, it will not be--the organisational learning will not be happening. This is the only way of organisational learning. And only the organisation who does that is deserving the name of learning organisations. Thank you very much. 

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