INSURANCE DEMAND AMONG LOW-INCOME HOUSEHOLDS AND THE ROLE OF MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS
Keywords:
Keywords: insurance demand, low-income households, poverty reduction, insurance penetration, marketing communications, trustAbstract
Abstract: As poverty falls in Uzbekistan, the main risk shifts from being poor to falling back into poverty. An illness, a lost harvest or the death of an earner can undo years of progress, and insurance is the instrument built for exactly this. Yet insurance reaches very few of the households that need it most. This paper asks why demand does not form among low-income households, and what marketing communications can and cannot do about it. It draws on international studies of insurance take-up and on a survey of 453 respondents in Uzbekistan carried out by Toshpo‘latova. The paper argues that price is not the real barrier. The barrier is that households cannot check what they are buying before they buy it. It also argues that the strong role of word of mouth in this market is not a marketing failure to be fixed, but the channel through which any useful message will have to travel.
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