Protection providers must rethink consumer approach

Edmund Tirbutt is a freelance journalist and protection consultant

It’s hard to pick up a magazine or newspaper without seeing some self-appointed protection expert bemoaning the fact that sales of individual income protection, critical illness cover and life assurance are falling woefully short of the sorts of levels that we need to achieve to reduce the protection gap.  But it’s about time that some of these very same individuals started to accept some of the blame for the way they have contributed to this situation by failing to engage their potential audiences.

The individual protection market has proved woefully inadequate in demonstrating any real imagination or wit in facing the challenges that lie before it, and unless they address this problem they are unlikely to make significant progress. Two of the issues that badly need addressing are product literature design and conference and seminar presentation.

Having myself done a lot of copywriting work for protection insurers, I cannot help observing that they are much too risk averse in their approaches. Insurers normally start out by saying they want to do something different but when you then come up with a bold ground breaking design they invariably say how much they like it but that they don’t want to be “quite as different as that”. Indeed, with the notable exception of Bright Grey’s, I can’t recall seeing any product literature in the industry that stands out as trying to be truly innovative.

It’s about time others started going back to the drawing board and putting themselves in the consumer’s shoes and asking what would really captivate them. I would suggest bolder use of colours, more provocative photos and greater use of humour would be essential starting points.

There also needs to be a radical overhaul of the standards of public speaking within the industry. How can you expect the intermediary or consumer to be interested in these products if you bore them to death the whole time? Most presentations you see give the impression that the speaker has reluctantly stayed up the night before to do their PowerPoint and have barely given a thought towards how to keep their audiences interested. Even those who appear to have indulged in suitable preparation seem to have undergone charisma-bypass operations.

As someone who does a lot of speaking in another field, I can assure you that the way to engage an audience about the need for health insurance is not to bombard them with figures about the chances of going ill or dying.  Being a market leading author on alcohol addiction, I have delivered 17 talks around the country during recent months on alcohol and stress in the workplace and not once have I ever bored people with grizzly statistics about the dangers of drinking. Instead I have focused on making my talks entertaining and engaging in a way that makes people want to take a look at their lives.

The effectiveness of this approach is well attested to by the stream of emails I receive from people telling me that they have given up alcohol or severely cut down their consumption of it simply as a result of seeing me speaking.  It’s about time those who tread the boards in the protection field started to question whether they are taking a suitable approach.