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Sun Life Canada

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TOOLS

TEAM 

MY CONTRIBUTION 

Team of 4 

Researcher:  I was a researcher on the the general insruance/ financial industry trends and the user survey 

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UI/UX Study Lead: Sun Life had given us a mobile app mock up that was on a webpage. I had taken this app and created a survey around it that tried to gain meaningful insights from our two target markets (millennials and newcomers).

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Overview

The objective of this Master's Capstone project was to understand the different product offerings that Sun Life Financial has and to identify key ways to engage with the millennial and new comer audiences through focused primary and secondary market research, a full fledged competitive analysis, and various digital solution strategies. The ideas that my team and I presented were regarded by the director of marketing as having the potential to help differentiate Sun Life Financial from it's competitors. 

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My team and I's objective was to identify key ways to engage with the millennial and newcomer to Canada target audiences. As a team we were required to complete the following items with success: 

 

  • Focused market research to gain insights on how to best engage millennial and newcomers with insurance and financial products through digital means

  • Competitive analysis of Sun Life Financial's direct competitors to understand Sun Life's position in the market place

  • Competitive analysis of innovative competitors to improve team creativity and application of engagement strategies for Sun Life 

  • A creative digital solution strategy that includes several small actionable suggestions as well as four big concepts (net new means) that take investment and time to implement 

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SUMMARY
PROBLEM STATEMENT

Problem Statement

Our collaboration with Sun Life Canada was to focus on creating net new engagement strategies towards two target audiences; New Comers to Canada and Millennials. 

 

New Comers to Canada: Canada is a country that is world-renowned for its cultural diversity. Our country is now home to millions of immigrants, who come from hundreds of different countries around the world and speak multiple languages. Aside from adding cultural diversity to Canada, newcomers also have a substantial impact on our economy, as they represent a large portion of the future growth of Canada.

MillennialsThe world is changing at a rapidly increasing rate. The youth of today are more tech-savvy and socially connected than ever before, due in large part to the rise of social media. But they also face challenges that were largely unknown to generations before them, including rising levels of student debt and high unemployment, which in turn has altered their priorities in regards to moving out, getting married, and having children. 

User's & Audience 

The users for this project were clearly defined. The users are: 

  1. New comers to Canada 

  2. Millennials 

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USERS
ROLE

Roles & Responsibilities 

Within this project, I had several different roles, as did the rest of my team as the project was large and we had a smaller team. The roles I took on during the project are outlined below:

 

  • Researcher: We all took on reading several industry reports and noted the most important finings and trends within the financial/ insurance industry. I was a researcher on the the general "insruance/ financial industry trends", which directly correlated to the Innovative Competitive Analysis Lead role. In addition, I also helped faciliate a survey with participants from our target audiences. The survey asked about our respondent's general opinions and experiences with the insurance and financial industry. 

 

  • Innovative Competitive Analysis Lead: Through our secondary research, I began to notice several different competitors from the United States, that were noted in research reports. These competitors had very creative strategies to engage with their audiences. I created a list of these competitors and created a methodology for our team to analyze these competitors. I also conducted a website analysis of each of our innovative competitors as well as Sun Life (for base comparison). I came up with the website analysis through researching common criteria used for a UI/UX website competitive analyses and applied them directly to these competitors.

 

  • UI/UX Study Lead: Sun Life had given us a mobile app mock up that was on a webpage. I had taken this app and created a survey around it that tried to gain meaningful insights from our two target markets (millennials and newcomers). I created a website (http://nicolepapp25.wix.com/sunlifeapp) that housed an instructional video, written instructions as well as the survey itself for people to use. I helped my team facilitate recruiting individuals to take the survey. Prior to this, I gained feedback on questions, the survey process and overall language of our survey, from different individuals who were familiar with UI/UX. Once the improvements were implemented, the participants were recruited and took our survey, I analyzed the qualitative data by using coding to find themes and direct improvements. This survey later translated into one of our four large digital concepts – improvements to the current Sun Life app.

 

  • Creative Director: Throughout our entire project, I would try to facilitate different brainstorming sessions whenever it made the most sense. These brainstorming sessions were intended to use our key findings from research on the industry, findings from our competitive analyses and our survey results, to come up with creative solutions that the client can implement. I had used these different brainstorming sessions to guide our team into thinking of ways we can conceptualize these findings. I had also contributed the groundwork for 3 of the 4 final big digital concepts or “net new means” (Sun Life app re-design suggestions, Advisor Match and Health Competition).

 

  • Presentation Lead: Our client had asked our group to present in Toronto to their marketing executive team, as well as the required Stratford presentation. I had created both slide decks, which were custom designed using the report design as inspiration (created by Michelle Fujita) with my own creative flair. Unfortunately, when we sent the Toronto slide deck to the client, they preferred a design that was exactly the same as the report. Due to time constraint, Michelle and I ended up working together on the Toronto Slide Deck V2, using the exact images she had for each section. 

 

  • Project Manager’s Assistant: Throughout our project, I would help Michelle organize prior to any meeting with the client by creating agendas, emailing the client If needed and to keep our team on track if needed. 

SCOPE
PROCESS

Scope and Constraints 

The project scope was focused on looking at insurance product use across new comers to Canda and Millennials and brainstorming innovative ways to engage with each target audience based on their behaviour patterns. 
 
 
The entire project had to be completed in three months from start to finish. This included primary and secondary research, writing the research report and presenting our findings and recommendations in in a clear and engaging fashion. 

The Process

Overall, our team worked very well together despite a few areas of concern. A team mate and and I both had international components to our locations throughout this project, this resulted in a mutual understanding of each other’s situations. We had the ability to be very flexible and trusting if something came up that was not expected. The strong communication as well as effort helped us to accomplish tasks as a team in a timely manner, as well as strengthen the team bond and trust that we already had. 

 

Our team's work ethic could be considered 11 out of 10 because we had so many different factors against us, yet we were able to still deliver a project of such magnitude on time, with quality and no delays in any part of the project. My team mate's work location caused time differences, which resulted in our need to respect when he could Skype and when he needed to go to bed. My family trip caused time differences, periods of being offline, the need to purchase data to function (which didn’t work initially). Despite the circumstances that were against us we over delivered to the client based on their feedback. 

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We started this project be exploring several market research reports on the state of insurance and banking within Canada across our two target audiences; New comers to Canada and Millennials. 

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We then continued to do our own primary research which explored the preferences of new comers to Canada and millennials in our own networks. We also built out a usability study to test the existing Sun Life mobile app. 

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Once we had both our primary and secondary research, we continued to conduct a competitor analysis across both target audience group's preferences. 
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Once we had our primary and secondary data, as well as our competitor analysis, we started mapping out the areas of opportunity based on user preferences and solutions that currently weren't available  with the existing offerings on the market. 
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We attended a think tank session focused on with the Sun Life marketing team to provide insights on millennials based on our research findings. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Based on our findings with the affinity mapping we started building out our digital solution recommendations. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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We presented our final presentation twice; once to our class and professor (this was done remote from Slovakia)  in addition to our project sponsors, which included the Director of Marketing who flew in from Montreal to watch our presentation​
 
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Outcomes & Lessons

The outcome of this project was that the Sun Life Canada marketing team found value in the solutions we presented to them. The Director of Marketing at Sun Life Canada expressed that our ideas have the potential to help differentiate their company towards new comers to Canada and Millennials. I was able to get a great reference as a result of the project:

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The biggest lessons learnt during this project are:

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  • What it takes to work with a team that is located across the company; two of our team members (including me) were located in Europe during the project 

  • The importance of recording your presentation if technology reliability or distance is a concern 

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OUTCOMES

Artifacts

New Comers to Canada Report

Project Pitch Deck 

Millennial Report 

Final Slide Deck 

ARTIFACTS
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