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Beyond Beige
The Untapped Potential of Underserved Niches

Podcast: Beyond Beige — The Untapped Potential of Underserved Niches

Check out Ben Ruddle, senior principal in strategy at Publicis Sapient, as he explains the opportunities in focusing on individuals and businesses with unique needs (known as “beyond beige”), the rise of comparison sites and Publicis Sapient’s expansion into the insurance market.

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Article: Beyond Beige

How to Grow Footprint and Unleash Profit in the Long Tail

To reap the dividends of meeting the needs of underserved customers, insurers will need to ask themselves some hard questions—as this article explains.

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The relentless march of price comparison websites (PCWs) has encouraged insurers and brokers to offer increasingly commoditized products to a core group of low-risk, straightforward customers.
 
This approach has simply pushed the same customers through the sales funnels while identifying which of them are likely to auto-renew and accept higher-margin add-ons.
 
These “mainstream” customers may see more than 100 quotes on a PCW for their core insurance, but with little to actually differentiate between them besides price. This intense competition and narrow risk appetite have eroded away profit margins, and customers are now offered 100 shades of beige.

Not Everyone’s in the Mainstream

A large part of the market is still underserved and overpaying for insurance. These customers fall outside the core footprint of mainstream insurers.


This long tail contains millions of profitable customers, many of whom have no cover whatsoever in key lines of business. The cost-benefit case for serving them simply hasn’t added up for insurers. Getting to the required level of customer understanding, tailored propositions and personalized marketing has been too expensive—but things are changing.

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How to Compete

In this multitude of profitable niches, established insurers will need to start thinking like insurtechs. Unlocking the long tail means applying an end-to-end set of capabilities in a targeted way, truly understanding the needs of specific customer groups and designing propositions around them. This will feel unusual to most large insurers, and they will need support from a flexible data and analytics infrastructure that can scale heavily without adding complexity.


Insurers will also need to start thinking like investors. Expanding footprint is not a linear process, and some forays will fail. The challenge is to monitor and maximize the rate of success while minimizing distraction for the core business. Insurers should review their risk appetite and be prepared to invest in a series of niches in a portfolio model, cutting their losses when a venture doesn’t meet its commercial goals and reinvesting in those that are more promising.

To get started in the long tail, we recommend insurers ask themselves four questions:

Daniel Cole
Daniel Cole
Senior Managing Director, EMEA & APAC

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Matt Locsin
Matt Locsin
Managing Director, Innovation

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Ben Ruddle
Ben Ruddle
Senior Principal, Insurance

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