Life Insurance Unawareness Month?
Posted on October 6, 2009
Filed Under Uncategorized |
We just finished Life Insurance Awareness Month (LIAM). This laudable campaign has attempted to raise consumer awareness about how life insurance helps families achieve financial security. After spending more than $100 million over the years to educate the public about life insurance, the LIFE Foundation must be disappointed in the findings of a recent New York Life study. Conduced by Ipsos Public Affairs, the study found that 83% of Americans 30 and older agree that the economic crisis has increased their desire to protect their families. However, only one-third of those surveyed identified life insurance as a means to achieve this.
So how would consumers achieve greater security? More than half said they’d rely on their retirement savings, borrowing from family, or finding another job (yeah right!). Either consumers are in denial about life insurance or they are woefully undereducated or both. In either case, our industry has to try a lot harder to explain the value and function of one of its core products.
As communicators, we can play an important role in this education effort. Since the agent ranks continue to decline, the mantle increasingly falls to us to explain what life insurance does and whom it benefits. Plus we also need to keep communicating the fact that life insurance is still a great value, the recent Wall Street Journal article notwithstanding.
Bottom line: communicating the essential benefits of life insurance is too important to be left to Life Insurance Awareness Month. How about asking yourself every day, “What have I done lately to educate my company’s prospects and clients about life insurance?” If your answer is “not much,” what are you waiting for?
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