Bill Beck joined the insurer once known as Anthem as chief marketing officer in 2019. Since that time, the company has completely transformed into a health services organization called Elevance Health.
Assisted by about 1,000 associates dedicated to working on the rebrand in some way, Mr. Beck led the company's transition, which became official in June 2022, along with the launch of two new subsidiaries: Carelon and Wellpoint. Carelon groups the company's portfolio of non-insurance businesses, while Wellpoint unifies Medicare, Medicaid and commercial insurance products in states where Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield plans do not operate.
In 2024, the Amerigroup brand will reflect as Wellpoint in Arizona, Iowa, New Jersey, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Maryland. Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield, which operates in downstate New York, and Empire Blue Cross, which operates upstate, will become Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield and Anthem Blue Cross in 2024.
Question: It's been over a year since Anthem officially became Elevance Health. How did you plan for such a large transition?
Bill Beck: Our company has been transforming over the past five to 10 years. We had pulled together all these different assets and we introduced our purpose of improving the health of humanity, which is our North Star. Our internal conversations became centered around making sure that we were projecting to all of our audiences that we are much more than a payer. That's where we started having discussions about the name.
We wanted the name to strengthen the Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield brand and allow it to focus on what it does in local markets, while also introducing a corporate name that allows us to really stand for who we are. You don't take a corporate name change lightly, and it's a big conversation we wanted to make strategically.
In today's world, pretty much every word is trademarked. We had weekly meetings with our internal and external teams and went through over 200 possible names. We pressure tested names to make sure that they stood for what we wanted. From an iterative and creative process, we liked the words "elevate" and "advance," which we combined to get Elevance.
Q: How do you balance the new company name while maintaining 14 insurance brands with the Anthem BCBS name?
BB: The first thing we wanted to do when we announced the change was reinforce Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield in our 14 markets, while also communicating why we changed our corporate name from Anthem to Elevance Health.
We also wanted to make sure that our audiences understood our new corporate name and story, whether that's C-suites, regulators, investors or anyone looking at us from a corporate perspective. Through targeted segmentation of who really needed to understand who we are now as a company, we made sure the messaging went to them.
We didn't really talk to our members about Elevance Health because we wanted them to know they still have Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield. I want them to think about us as Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield or Wellpoint or Carelon. That gives us breathing room and allows us to talk about our health plans and our company.
Q: Along with the rebrand, you launched Carelon and Wellpoint. What was the reasoning behind launching these two subsidiaries from a brand perspective?
BB: Prior to this entire project, we had somewhere between 20 to 30 different brands that we've grown through acquisitions. This was a project for us to show who we are at the corporate level, but also to help people understand who we are with our products and services. Anthem was easy. With Wellpoint, we wanted to create a health plan brand in states where we don't have Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield. With Carelon, we wanted to bring everything together as a services brand that we could talk about holistically, as opposed to the individual businesses we had underneath it. My hope and expectation is that people can now take a step back and say, "I get Elevance Health."
Q: How are you measuring the success of this rebrand?
BB: There's multiple levels of key performance indicators both externally and internally. One of the most important ones is making sure that your associates understand why you're changing the name. We had and have a very big internal campaign to help everyone understand the change, including a quarterly internal survey with our associates to make sure they understand what the brand stands for — 96% of our associates understand how our purpose and the brand are connected.
Externally, we've looked at our brand tracking from the corporate perspective, whether its investors or regulators, to understand if they know Elevance Health. We're seeing that figure go up each quarter.
The other way we look at success is delivering on our commitments of selling our health plans and our businesses. We're seeing great success in Maryland with the launch of Wellpoint earlier this year. It's also been great to see how Carelon can now go to market and sell packages of our products in a holistic way, as opposed to this service or that service. That to me is a great success story.
Q: Are there unique challenges with rebranding a healthcare company specifically?
BB: Yes, there's so many moving parts because healthcare and our organization are complex. We have about 100,000 associates, along with different products and services we're coordinating. A lot of people might think it's easy to change a name, but there are a lot of systems and communications in healthcare where everything needs to be updated with the new logo.
Another cool opportunity when launching these new brands, whether it's Elevance Health or Wellpoint, is that we were able to tell stories that we haven't been able to tell previously. In my past work with home and food brands, there were some limitations on what you could do.
Q: What do you think is the biggest misconception about the health insurance industry today from where you sit?
BB: Our opportunity to tell how we take care of someone's full health is huge. Your health is greater than physical; it's mental and social, too, or the 80% of your health that happens outside the doctor's office. When you think about our industry, you think about that interaction between you and the doctor. We look at it from that 100%. That's why we have Carelon and all the different things we do in our communities.
I love this job and this industry because we do such cool things, and we can tell the stories about what we do. The purpose of all this is improving the health of humanity, and it's been a great way to continue to unlock who we want to be.