Case study: Aviva
Ranked as the fifth most connected company in the FTSE 100 by Radley Yeldar, Aviva scores particularly highly for its corporate mobile website.
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The homepage prominently features Aviva’s share prices on the London and New York stock exchanges, supplemented by news on the company and the wider insurance industry.
The brand uses its .com address to communicate corporate information, while country-specific URLs like Aviva.co.uk serve as the more product-oriented homepages directed at consumers.
Aviva is unusual among public companies, according to head of media Sue Winston, because it has more than 500,000 individual shareholders. That is partly due to being a product of mergers between other companies including Norwich Union, a former mutual organisation that floated on the stock market in 1997, giving all of its members shares.
“We have a very broad retail shareholder base,” she says. “In addition, we are reaching out to people who are potential and existing employees. Across the audiences, the common denominator is that digital media play an increasing role as the places where people get information these days. It is important to make sure that we don’t just follow that trend, but also be trend setters.”
In Radley Yeldar’s report, Aviva is commended for the timeliness of its corporate communications, registering a score of 69%, which compares with an average of 45% across the FTSE 100 on the timeliness measure. Aviva’s corporate responsibility blog and its Aviva.tv online video library are cited as two examples of this, showing a “well considered content strategy”.
Its lowest score – 47% – is on the extent to which all its corporate information channels are connected to one another. But this is a measure on which the FTSE 100 performs badly overall, averaging only 26%.
According to Winston, Aviva is attempting to improve this. As well as its desktop and mobile websites, the brand takes in social media, an app and resources provided through online document publishing platform Scribd.
She says: “It is about moving from the corporate megaphone saying ‘read my press release’ to saying ‘what do you think about it?’ or trying to engage people on the issues that we face as a financial services provider. We have a process of education and information we need to go through to help people understand why it’s important that they save for their retirement.”
