Marketing a product nobody wants to think about: overcoming low engagement

# Marketing a product nobody wants to think about: overcoming low engagement

Aflac had been selling supplemental health cover to millions of Americans through worksite enrolment for decades, and by the late 1990s hardly any of them could name the company. Then it put a duck on television that did little more than quack the brand name at people who were not listening. Unaided awareness moved from roughly one American in ten to the great majority within a few years, and the duck stayed on the payroll for more than twenty. The cover did not change. What changed is that a category people refuse to think about acquired a mascot they could not stop noticing.

That is the work in front of you: manufacturing attention, reward or habit around a purchase nobody wants to make. You are selling a promise about a future misfortune (a crash, a fire, a death) that customers actively do not want to imagine. Engagement is low by design, because thinking about the product means thinking about something bad. The target is salience (how easily your brand comes to mind at the moment of decision), built without the anxiety that makes people avoid the whole category.

Why insurance engagement is structurally low

It is a grudge purchase. People buy because a lender or a regulator requires it, or because dread pushes them there. Nobody feels joy handing over a premium.

The product is invisible. There is no daily object to carry the brand. The policy sits in a drawer or an inbox.

Success looks like nothing. A customer who never claims has paid for twelve months of something that "did nothing". The best outcome for the insurer feels like the worst value to the buyer.

Together these produce the renewal cliff: attention spikes for a few days a year, then drops to zero. Marketing that only appears in those days is arguing about price at the worst possible moment, against the persistent comparison profile the price-comparison lesson in this block maps out.

The cliff is steeper in some lines than others. Compulsory motor third-party cover gives you almost no legitimate reason to make contact between renewals, which is why reward and habit programmes cluster in health, home and pet, where the policy touches the customer's body or house every week. Life cover is the hardest case: each contact risks reminding a healthy forty-year-old exactly why they signed.

Reframe: from "product" to "peace of mind"

The insurers who hold attention stop marketing the policy and market the feeling of being handled. Alan, the French health insurer, built a brand on stripping out the vocabulary: plain-language explanations of what is and is not covered, reimbursement tracked in the app, and a steady output of health content (sleep, mental health, paediatrics) that never mentions a premium. The contract is the by-product; the promise is that someone competent is on your side and speaks like a person.

Compare "Comprehensive auto coverage from $X per month" with "If you break down at 2am, one tap and we are on the way." The second sells the moment of relief.

This reframe matters because fear-based messaging often backfires. Research on threat appeals shows that scaring people without giving them an easy, immediate action makes them cope by avoiding the message. A useful primer is the Extended Parallel Process Model, which explains why "threat plus low efficacy" produces denial rather than action.

Rule of thumb: every time you raise a risk, pair it with a simple, doable step. Never leave the customer holding the fear alone.

Engineering touchpoints across the year

The aim is to spread contact across the calendar so the brand is already familiar before renewal arrives. Think of it as a touchpoint calendar, a planned sequence of low-friction, useful contacts.

1. Value that is not a bill

• A home insurer sends a "before the storm" checklist when severe weather is forecast in that customer's region.
• A health insurer nudges a flu jab reminder with the three nearest places to get one.
• A pet insurer flags the foods that turn toxic at holiday time.

None of these mention price. Each earns the "you are handled" feeling for a few cents.

2. Milestone touchpoints

Tie contact to the customer's life, not your billing cycle. One year with no claim deserves recognition rather than silence, because silence is what makes the premium feel wasted. A new baby added to a life policy deserves congratulations, not an upsell in the same email.

3. Rewards with a real price tag

Vitality, the UK life and health insurer, runs the most committed version of this. Members earn points for weekly activity and convert them into a free coffee or cinema ticket, part-funded gym membership, and an Apple Watch whose monthly cost falls when you move. The rewards have genuine marginal cost, which is the point: the programme buys weekly contact with people whose only other interaction would be a direct debit.

The claim itself is the other great attention moment, and the trust lesson in this block takes it apart properly. What belongs here is the dependency: a touchpoint calendar promising warmth every month raises the bar the claims team has to clear, and a bad claim after a year of friendly nudges reads as hypocrisy rather than bad luck.

Salience without anxiety: the messaging rules

Lead with control, not catastrophe. "Here is how to stay covered on your trip" beats "Accidents abroad can cost thousands."

Be specific. Vague risk frightens more than concrete risk. "Escape of water is our most common home claim, and here are three ways to prevent it" reassures because it can be acted on.

Normalise the category. Mascots and gentle humour work because they lower dread. Compare the Market (a comparison site, not an insurer) launched Aleksandr the meerkat in 2009 and bought enormous fame, then hit the limit of fame: attention is not the same as a reason to come back. Meerkat Movies, the two-for-one cinema offer introduced in 2015, attached a reward to the character so the joke turned into a habit with a renewal date.

Match the channel to the emotion. Admin can go by app. Anything touching loss, health or death deserves a warmer channel and a human option.

🎬 [VIDEO: "The Science of Fear Appeals in Advertising" - youtube.com - a clear explainer on why scaring your audience often reduces action, with marketing examples]

Build the habit loop

Salience grows through repetition, but only if each contact is welcome:

1. Trigger: a real-world moment (a storm forecast, a life event, a Monday step target).

2. Action: one easy step (tap to check cover, log the walk, download the checklist).

3. Reward: something small and concrete, or at least the feeling of being safer.

The anti-pattern is contact that is all trigger and no reward. Constant upsell emails train customers to ignore you, which is worse than silence, because you have spent budget teaching them a habit of not opening.

Two failure modes to price in before you launch a reward scheme. First, any activity reward gets gamed; step counts can be earned by a dog wearing the tracker, and the more valuable the perk, the more effort goes into faking it. Second, and more consequential, wellness rewards select the people who were already active. That improves the loss ratio, which is welcome, but it means your engagement numbers are partly an underwriting effect wearing a marketing badge. Claiming the retention lift as proof the campaign works, when the fitter cohort would have renewed anyway, is how these programmes get over-funded and then cut.

Measuring engagement that actually matters

Opens and clicks are easy to count and easy to fool yourself with. Tie the calendar to outcomes that predict retention.

• Renewal rate against a holdout. Comparing engaged with unengaged customers proves almost nothing, since the engaged were the loyal ones to begin with. Withhold the programme from a randomised slice of a comparable cohort and read the gap.
• Cost per incremental renewal. A coffee costs a couple of pounds; acquiring a replacement policyholder costs orders of magnitude more. If the reward budget divided by extra renewals stays well under acquisition costacquisition costCustomer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the total sales and marketing spend divided by the number of new customers gained in a period. It measures how efficiently you grow.View full definition →, the loop pays.
• Unprompted brand recall, tested occasionally: can customers name you without seeing your logo? That is salience made measurable, and the Aflac lesson is that it can move without the product changing at all.
• Churn timing. If cancellations cluster tightly at renewal, you have a renewal-cliff problem, not a price problem.

A caution on data: these touchpoints run on sensitive information (health, home, family). Respect the privacy rules in your market and honour consent. One over-personalised message ("we noticed you have not walked much this week") can undo a year of goodwill.

A simple planning frame

Run any insurance campaign through four questions:

1. Does it raise a fear? If yes, does it also give an easy action? No orphan fear.

2. Is it useful even to someone who never claims? If not, it will feel like a bill.

3. Does it follow the customer's calendar or ours? Prefer theirs.

4. Would a real person be glad to receive this? If you hesitate, cut it.

Key Takeaways

• Engagement is structurally low because insurance is a grudge purchase, invisible day to day, and "works" by doing nothing. Plan around that instead of fighting it in the last week before renewal.
• Sell control and the feeling of being handled, as Alan does by removing the jargon, and pair every risk you raise with an immediate action so fear does not become avoidance.
• Fame is not habit. The meerkat bought Compare the Market attention; the cinema offer gave people a reason to come back, just as Vitality's coffees and watches buy weekly contact at a real per-member cost.
• Reward schemes get gamed, and they attract the already-healthy, so part of any retention lift belongs to underwriting rather than marketing.
• Measure against a randomised holdout and on cost per incremental renewal, watch churn timing for cliff effects, and keep personalisation short of creepy.