Is ALDI insurance actually good, different?
ALDI is the weird cousin of the supermarket wars - will Aussies trust its foray into insurance?
Everyone's favourite German export ALDI (sorry Volkswagen) has launched a new insurance arm - creatively titled ALDI Insurance. It will be offering comprehensive car insurance, home & contents insurance, as well as landlord insurance.
I'm not especially surprised. Aussies are already used to supermarkets selling them home & contents insurance alongside $8 loaves of bread, so it makes a lot of sense for ALDI to get in on the action.
The biggest challenge for ALDI is going to be making sure they still feel different enough to the products offered by Coles and Woolies to stick with their brand, especially with today's spicy conversations about supermarket monopolies.
Good, Different Enough?
ALDI insurance is powered by Honey Insurance, a relatively new insurance brand that has already made a pretty big impact (including winning a few Finder awards) but doesn't have mass public recognition just yet.
Honey markets itself as a quite different insurance brand, including offering smart home devices that try to alert you to problems in your home that might lead to a claim.
By helping you claim less, they pass on an 8% discount to you if you install and connect their sensors in your home. ALDI are also offering this with their insurance product, which could go a long way to separating them from their competition.
Of course, it's a boon for Honey as well - partnering with such a well-known brand gives them the chance to reach a much larger audience.
Just this year Honey partnered with Bank Australia to distribute its insurance products - this after taking on $108 million of investment. So expansion seems to be on Honey's mind.
The beginning of a wonderful whitelabel
This isn't the first time ALDI has used its brand power to sell a non-supermarket product. ALDI is already a reseller for Telstra mobile, with Aussies able to access the Telstra wholesale network with an ALDI sim card.
Now they're selling a few flavours of insurance - but why stop there? The Australian Business Review is reporting ALDI has put in trademark applications for everything from travel and health insurance to solar energy and internet.
White labelling, which refers to this process of selling another company's product under your own brand, is really common across the insurance industry, both worldwide and in Australia.
For ALDI, it means they can get in on the rapidly expanding insurance market without the massive cost it would need to start up a brand new product.
But with so many brands in the market, and likely more to come, the onus is on ALDI to prove its insurance product can live up to the supermarket's weird but refreshing reputation.
