As one of the organisers of the new Seven Families initiative, Roy McLoughlin's mission statement is clear: he wants to raise the profile of income protection. He tells Paul Robertson about IPTF's plans to get the word out.
“With IP there’s a moral and an ethical stance,” he said. “If someone’s off ill long term, you can turn round to the rest of your staff and say ‘actually he’s still being looked after and he’s still being paid’. In situations I’ve come across, you only need one or two claims in the company to justify the whole premium anyway.”
Interestingly, the Seven Families initiative is covering ground perhaps most recently broken by Aviva, which is heavily backing this project, in its use of emotion to elevate a subject. If this worked for Aviva and if it works as expected for the IPTF, is emotion set to become a more common marketing tool in terms of protection? And is this a good thing or, as a financial product, should protection be sold in a clear-headed manner?
McLoughlin said: “When I hear so-called experts come out about behavioural economics, as if they just discovered this, I think ‘talk to advisers that have been advising for 25 years’. What we do is as much psychology as technical. The skill of an adviser, some people might call it a disturbance, is making people aware of situations – awareness, coming back to my original point.
“But isn’t it interesting that, in the States, May is Disability Awareness Month? Maybe we should start doing something like that. Because, whether you like it or not – and I’m going to ski over towards auto-enrolment here for two seconds – what auto-enrolment is about is making people aware they are going to have to look after themselves when it comes to retirement. That’s the message of auto-enrolment. Why? Because the state pension is going to run out of money.
“So why don’t we use exactly the same principle with protection? Welfare reform says the state is going to run out of being able to provide for people if they’re ill long term, so we need to make them aware they need to do something themselves. I’m not saying something as drastic as auto-enrol people, but...
“So let’s take that concept and move it to protection, because the positive side is every single person in the UK – 28 million of us, whether they like it or not – will have a financial services product for the first time. It’s called a pension. So that’s your first product. What’s your second product? Protect it.
“If, at the same time, people are aware of it because of things like Seven Families, then I think it’s an easier chat. Seven Families obviously isn’t just looking at individuals. We’re hoping employers will look at it, and part of our marketing strategy, our brand strategy and the YouTube channel is going to be as much aimed at employers as it is employees.”
