Wellness opportunity: adopting new approaches to risk and return

Wellness represents real opportunities for the insurance sector. How can firms exploit this marketplace? The Wellness industry provides products or services to healthy people to make them feel healthier and look better, to slow the effects of aging or to prevent diseases from happening. It has doubled in the last five years and is now worth $500bn globally.

As healthy employees are more productive then unhealthy employees, improvement in employee health is a powerful way to enhance performance and results, improve retention of key staff and contribute to corporate social responsibility. Corporate Wellness programmes are a key focus for the major insurance companies with forward-thinking companies looking to invest in the Wellness of their employees. However, many are unsure as to how to implement them effectively.

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An opportunity but also a challenge

Through their scale, access to information, brand and distribution presence, insurance firms possess natural advantages to move into Wellness but will have to decide how best to exploit this marketplace. We see the following as significant questions to address:

• Moving to a “clinical” view of the world

  Perhaps the biggest step will be the move from an actuarial to clinical view of the world. With insurance firms characterised by a conservative approach as to how profit will materialise and an investment returning over a relatively short time period, the challenge of a long-term clinical-based solution will present an immediate hurdle. Responses to advances in technology and lead time for product development will further test firms’ appetite for risk.

• Creating new propositions

  Proposition development will need to address the fundamental articulation of a benefits argument for personal and corporate clients that wins business and loyalty. Customers will need to be motivated to manage a better lifestyle so as reduce risk and improve their quality of life in a way that promotes diagnosis rather than treatment and reconcile an adjustment in pricing and reimbursement from ‘drug and cut’ to ‘prevent and maintain’. It is axiomatic that Wellness propositions will deliver value if constructed well and executed well!

• Uniting potential collaborators

  As competencies will need to be developed in understanding disease states and their related conditions, co-morbidities, progression cycles and potential interventions, partnerships will be key. A challenge will be to find ideas that unite potential collaborators rather than disadvantage them by moving risk/cost to them and different forms of revenue generation and profit sharing will need to be explored.

To discuss strategies for success in this emerging marketing opportunity please contact us.