Cheap, lowdown marketing by Insurance company

The insurance broker that sold me my latest car insurance policy sent me a polite email today, asking if I'd complete a survey and get the chance to win £250. I thought fair enough, companies can't get it right unless they listen to their customers, so I'll do it. Off I went to the survey page:

Page 1: Questions about my background, accomodation, employment and stuff. All very high level, nothing intrusive.

Page 2: Simple question, do I work part time or full time. Again no problem

Page 3: Questions about my outgoings, again fairly high level

Page 4: Do I know anyone personally who has been made redundant or suffered ill health

Page 5: Here we go, cheap marketing alert:

* Have you taken out income protection to cover any of the following ....
* Which are you most concerned about? (Being made redundant, being unable to work due to ill health, both)
* How would your family survive if you lost your job....
* Do you think you could survive on £79.15 (statutory sick pay) or £64.30 (Jobseeker's allowance) per week?

At this point I abandoned their survey and sent them a polite email:

I think it is fundamentally wrong on so many levels. Firstly they tried to trick me into listening to their marketing spiel. Secondly they tried to scare me into buying their insurance, and thirdly how dare they try to capitalise on people's insecurities during a time of rising financial insecurity for the whole country. Cheeky so and so's they are.

 

That be insurance companies for you.

 

Whatever you buy these days, the guarantee seems to come attached to a 'customer survey' form. Now, as clueless says, successful marketing relies heavily on knowing your target market, but I fail to see what bearing my accommodation, annual income, health or indeed what newspaper I may or may not read, has to do with buying a particular item or its ability to function for the requisite 12 month. I know what demographic I am, I refuse to give out any personal information unless it's necessary for the product I'm buying (insurance, etc), and I take great delight in putting a nice neat line through their 'survey' and writing 'irrelevant to guarantee' through it.

Think about it ... have you ever heard of anyone actually winning one of these 'incentives'? :rotfl:

 

Unfortunately, when someone approaches you by mail, e-mail, telephone etc, they are invariably trying to sell you something. Especially those that ring up and start off by saying - I am not trying to sell you something.

Good for you Shiney - I like it. :D

 

I used to work for a firm that did all the IT and technical side of marketing on behalf of various marketing agencies and the likes. We handled many a prize draw, and did actually randomly pick a winner out of each customer list. It was genuinely random, in the sense that we had a program (that's I'd written) generated a random record number and pulled out the record of the customer based on that. The lady who sat at the next desk would watch over my shoulder to make sure I stuck with the first result that came out, then we'd tell our client who was the winner. What they did with that info afterwards I have no idea. I only know that I was never allowed to win anything because I was directly involved in the prize draw process:(

True. The best thing to do in that situation is to throw them off their script. Ask them simple questions like 'what are you try to sell me? Why would I be interested? What's in it for me? etc. All reasonable questions but invariably they are following a script, and their script doesn't make allowances for such things so the caller gets very confused very quickly.

 

It seemed that after my Mum had her stroke and had great difficulty making herself understood on the phone, she constantly got calls from some company who began '... I'm not trying to sell you anything, but .....'. I happened to be there one day, answered the phone, listened politely for a moment then asked, equally politely if I could just stop him for a minute - he stopped whereupon I carefully and in great unnecessary detail described my Mum's wall unit. There was a long, confused pause before the line finally went dead!

My daughter's remedy is slightly less sophisticated - she merely listens for about 10 seconds then, in a loud voice says 'Look, just put the knife down,' before returning to the caller and saying, 'Sorry about that, do carry on' :yho: