Ideas for good marketing

It is not easy caring about income protection. For one thing there are lots of people who do not believe in the product. I have met IFAs who variously do not think people are off work for long periods, believe the product does not pay them enough commission or who just get fed up waiting for their cases to be completed.

Other people believe the product is a great idea in theory but just impossible to write in practice. Some believe that critical illness cover needs to be prioritised and others think it is just too expensive. That is not counting the people who do not believe that insurers will pay claims, or at least pay them often enough.

On top of this, some people were hoping that the sickness and absence review by the department for work and pensions would provide a fillip for the product perhaps by building on the Demos think-tank report which mooted the concept of compulsory IP.

There are others who rather naively thought we could take over the payment of sickness benefit and there are those who felt the review might suggest tax relief if employers agreed to provide income protection for their employees.

None of these things materialised but the review made some very positive points about the value of income protection and the important support that the product provided. The argument against providing more incentives initially surprised me in that it pointed out that IP is a product which is primarily held by wealthier individuals. It would be politically difficult to provide fiscal incentives to a product that might be perceived to be elitist. I understand this argument and it should not be seen as a snub for the product.

At the same time, we have a Treasury initiative on simple products and a not very widely publicised paper by the FSA on short-term income protection. The Income Protection Task Force intends to engage fully with both these initiatives.

I have never been naive enough to believe that a fairy godmother would emerge, wave her wand and penetration rates for the product would rise exponentially. I know that many committed members of the task force have never expected that either. The job of developing greater sales of IP is a very important one that has to be viewed as a long-term project.

It requires a vision for the product, ideas that overcome the many objections that are laid before it and above all a passion and an appetite that never forgets that there are millions of people in the UK (and yes I mean millions) who really need the product because if the worst happens (and sometimes desperate incapacity can be worse financially than death) they and their families are extraordinarily vulnerable to the drop in earnings that they will face.

The accident or the illness that destroys the life of the sufferer also ricochets into the lives of their families and hits them incredibly hard too.