Here’s what 

Cigna Healthcare wanted to grow sales and retention of International Private Medical Insurance among High-Net-Worth Individuals moving abroad. Cigna already understood customers once they reached its own channels. The bigger gap was what happened before that point: who represented the strongest opportunity, what prompted them to think about healthcare and when Cigna should enter the purchase journey. 

To answer the problem, we reviewed existing customer knowledge, explored the competitive landscape and spoke with internal teams to develop a hypothesis. We then tested our hypothesis through in depth interviews with consumers and experts in Cigna’s target markets. The research revealed a much clearer growth audience and purchase journey, which changed our understanding of where Cigna’s greatest opportunity lay.  

We then brought Cigna’s senior leaders together in a working session, including the CEO and heads of Marketing, Sales, Strategy and Insight. Rather than simply presenting the findings, we used the workshop to embed them in the business: working through what the evidence meant for Cigna, where it challenged existing assumptions and how it should shape future decisions. 

So what 

Our work identified four strategic shifts, changed how Cigna Healthcare thought about activation and gave them a framework for matching the right message and channel to those moments. The research showed opportunities to improve how information, digital journeys and service work together, as well as how Cigna could build brand trust.  

Ultimately, the project moved from answering “How do we sell more IPMI?” to giving Cigna a strategic view of who to prioritise, when to engage them, what to say and how to deliver a better customer experience. 

Now what 

We designed the next stage to take the research into the business, rather than leave it in a debrief. Our transformation programme bought leaders from Sales, Marketing, Insight, Proposition and Strategy together to agree the commercial principles that would guide future growth. 

That means the research shapes customer conversations in Sales, the balance between brand and demand generation in Marketing, future learning in Insight, product and experience choices in Proposition, and long-term priorities in Strategy.  

The result is a path from research to strategy to organisational change. Insight becomes something the business can keep using, challenging and acting on, not something that ends when the research presentation does.