Why is it that we need to be SOLD insurance?
Insurance is one of the limited number of products that need to be sold to us rather than being a product that we’d go out and buy for ourselves.
That has the effect that insurance marketing is a little different than normal marketing. Historically it’s been very much hard-sell though successive laws and advertising restrictions have eliminated most of the more obnoxious methods that have been used in the past. Even so, it’s still quite often one of those hard-sell products.
But why is that? After all, in principle, insurance is a good idea. It’s there for those times when the unexpected happens and aims to provide you with resources that you just couldn’t rally together by yourself. Unfortunately, the hard-sell required has reduced many of those advantages and, in some cases, can even totally neglect them. Perhaps the worst example are the savings type “insurance” policies that almost everyone has bought at one time or another. Buy them after you’re around 60 or so and you’ll find that they will be quite consistent in paying you back less than you paid them, yet 60+ year olds continue to buy them.
The best example should be house insurance yet the insurance companies have introduced so many loop holes that it hardly seems worthwhile to pay it. Right now we’re finding out the hard way that the insurance company decided to radically downgrade our own house insurance policy without telling us so we’ve almost ten times the excess to pay and things that we thought were covered (and should have been covered) aren’t.
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