How telling a different story could help insurers build truly meaningful connections with the next generation

I’ve for a long time believed that one of the most significant barriers to insurance penetration has been a lack of ability of insurers to tell a compelling story to their customers.

We can develop as many innovative products, channels and pricing models as we want, but if the narrative that we’re using isn’t resonating than all of this is pointless. So much investment and time is going into digitalisation, alternative underwriting, tech driven distribution and product development, but not so much into developing an authentic and cut through message or building a truly meaningful and deep emotional connection with customers.

Insurance can play a hugely positive and enabling role in people’s lives but the narrative in the main has been what I’d call a ‘finger wagging’ sales technique. “You should have insurance because if you die what will happen to your family”, “You should buy insurance otherwise your kids won’t be able to go to good schools”, “you should buy insurance because what if you get into an accident” etc etc. This messaging is a parent child type conversation, selling through guilt and fear. Anything that is sold in this way will of course create a negative association. To get around this in India, Insurance is sold as a tax planning vehicle or investment solution. All of this contributes to a lack of customer engagement with insurance and insurance companies.

Instead of talking about motor insurance in the context of accidents, let’s change it to talking about enabling great journeys, allowing families and individuals to create memories during road trips.

Instead of talking about the implications to your family if you die, life insurance should be about empowering people to live the lives they want and dream of, support them to take the risks needed to better their lives and achieve their ambitions.

If we don’t need to worry about consequences we always make braver decisions, we follow our hearts and we remain care free. Insurance can play this role, by having insurance we have something there that will protect us if anything goes wrong, therefore we can go forward with confidence.

This change in focus can also include playing a more active role in customers lives. Risk is something we all face on a daily basis, all our decisions have an element of assessing risk. Changing a job, moving to a different city or country, buying a home, sending our kids to a different school and so on, these are all decisions that incorporate risk. At the moment we use our friends and family to help us make these decisions, but why couldn’t an insurance company play a role here? Insurance companies are experts in risk, so why limit this to designing insurance products, why not expand that expertise into delivering value in a much more holistic manner. If my insurance company helped me make my day to day as well as bigger life decisions, unrelated to products, I would begin to see them as part of my close eco-system of brands I consider important and an emotional connection would be built that is significantly more important that a transactional product based interaction. This would allow insurers to have ongoing conversation and dialogue as well positively contribute to their customers lives. They would become a relevant and prominent brand in the customer’s conscience.

A proposition that helps customers make decisions based on an understanding of the risks, assess and mitigate risks they face on a day to day basis and solve real problems people are faced with could be hugely powerful. The sort of conversation it could drive would be so much more engaging, what are you worried about today? What problems are you trying to solve in your life right now? What risk are you thinking of taking? Need help making a big decision? It can both help people understand the risks in their lives and mitigate them but also take risks with the comfort of their insurer helping them to make sure those risks are informed and managed. Instead of stopping people from doing things or trying to remove risk completely, it empowers people to make decisions and pursue goals/ambitions.

I truly believe in the positive role insurance can play in society, that’s why it’s so frustrating to see the poor penetration rates globally. If insurance has been around for such a long time, and it’s such an obvious thing we should all have, why don’t more of us value it? It must be time to look deeply at how we change the narrative and re-imagine the relationship between insurance companies and their customers.