How to insure your health and get your premium back if you don't claim

I've been trying to find out a good health insurance for the past one week, and been visiting blogs and sites about it. I realized that the money we pay as premium is gone into thin air if we don't make any claims. The paltry sum offered as addition to sum assured isn't a good enough incentive not to make any claims.

However, I found one company that offers health insurance with a moneyback option. That was Tata AIG. Their critical insurance plan called Life Health Investor keeps you insured against 12 critical illnesses and against death. The miracle is that they will give your premiums back if you don't make any claim. Quite a good policy to keep. Now, that's what an innovative product look like!

A Marketing Lesson from Church Auctions

It's funny that we can observe the most interesting marketing insights in our daily life itself yet we don't recognize most of them. It's also funny that we notice something happening right in front of us when somebody else tells us about it.

I read about the role of social or peer pressure in buying decisions and the fear of losing vs the joy of winning. I had this going on at the back of my mind the whole day. Towards evening, I met a few neighbors of mine at the frontyard and began talking about Christmas and the festivities going on, especially as they were avid churchgoers.

They said most churches conduct auctions to raise money for charity and even small items raise money many times more than its true price as people bid higher and higher in religious fervour. Though interesting from a marketing perspective, it's something they said right after the discussion about church auctions that amused me. Talking about one of their relatives, one of them said "It's a shame that he hasn't paid the money due to the church from last year's auction." All of their family members supported this statement with affirmative nods.

I thought, "Great! What a nice way to market things!" People's fear of failure or loss is much greater than their sense of bargain. I say this from a truly marketing frame of mind. Therefore, I believe it's better to tell a customer as to what he stands to lose along with what he stands to gain in a deal to sway them your way.

I think people's fear of losing is much higher than their joy in winning something; more so when there is social or peer pressure involved. If the church can use it, I think God wouldn't mind us poor marketing souls using that too.... It should be true... bcoz I know I do so many things out of pure social pressure... like going to work in the morning :-) Disclaimer: If anybody from my workplace is reading this, this is not true, and thinking so is equal to blasphemy!

What happens when we organize?

Most power occurs because one side is better organized than the other. Labor is usually less well organized than management, criminals are usually less well organized than the police and customers are always less well organized than producers.

The internet promises to change that. It does it occasionally, sort of randomly. Sometimes, users will rise up and complain (as they did at Facebook). Or voters will organize online and hurt (or help) a politician or candidate.

Wikipedia works because so many contributors figured out how to self-organize into a group that produced something far more useful than a traditionally organized document.

I think we're at the earliest possible beginning of the changes we're going to see because of this sort of grass roots coordination.

Simple example: the Starbucks in Larchmont, NY keeps their thermostat at 64 degrees. And the stores in Breckenridge, Colorado keep their doors wide open all winter. If you're raging mad about energy waste, you could say something. And nothing would happen. But if customers organized and ten people said something or a hundred people said something... boom, new rules.

The system doesn't know what to do with a movement.

Link to the original post by Seth is given below.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/04/what-happens-wh.html

Ten Social News Sites for Easy Marketing

Steven Snell says: Major social media sites like Digg and StumbleUpon get most of the attention, but smaller, more targeted niche sites can provide excellent opportunities for networking with others in your niche and getting some exposure for your own work. While others are chasing after the Digg front page and 99% are getting nowhere, you could be getting hundreds and thousands of higher quality visitors over the same period of time by targeting niche social media sites.

Of course, the sites you choose to target will depend on what niche you’re in, but there are probably more niche-specific sites than you realize (See our list of over 400 social media sites). Some of them have very low traffic and influence, but others are very active. Here is a look at 10 that are doing things right.

Design Float

Design Float was started about a year ago to serve the web and graphic design community. It only takes about 3 votes to reach the front page and from there you can easily receive a few hundred visitors.

Health Ranker

Health Ranker was just started earlier this year (see my interview with Israel Lagares), but it has quickly built a decent-sized audience. Any bloggers in the health and fitness niche should definitely be active here.

Kirtsy

Formerly known as Sk*rt, Kirtsy is a site that targets women. Kirtsy certainly has a nicer look than many Pligg sites, and the content featured is fairly diverse.

BallHype

Most major social news sites include a sports section, but at many of them it’s less active than other sections like technology. BallHype has a large audience of sports fanatics.

Lipstick

Powered by Reddit, Lipstick targets celebrity news and gossip. There’s certainly plenty of blogs covering these topics to keep an active community at Lipstick.

Dealigg

If you’re looking to find bargains, Dealigg is a great place to start. Users can submit deals that they have found online and they get voted up by other users. It’s not quite the same as the other sites on this list where you would submit a blog post.

Sphinn

Sphinn is a popular site for internet marketing and search marketing. It has a large, intelligent audience that’s great for marketing the right kind of content.

I lIke Totally Love It

I Like Totally Love It is another site for finding products that can be purchased. It focuses on products that are “cool, innovative, exceptionally beautiful, or just weird.”

DZone

DZone is a highly specialized site for software developers and web developers. The popular items need to get about 5 votes and they go out to over 13,000 subscribers.

Hugg

Hugg promotes itself as being “Digg for Green.” Any content related to environmental issues can get some great exposure here.

Note: When submitting your content to niche social media sites, be sure that it is a good fit. Nothing will make you look more like a spammer than submitting something that is completely not relevant. The audiences of these sites expect to find a certain type of content, and they won’t appreciate random submissions. In fact, many of them will be deleted by the site owner and even if they aren’t deleted it won’t get any votes without gaming the system.

That being said, if your content is relevant they are all excellent places to promote your blog. Sign up to some niche social media sites!

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