Insurance Carrier to Offer Two New Policies for the Price of One

Did the title of this blog get your attention? I bet it did. Thankfully, it’s not true. Ask yourself, how long could a legitimate insurance company sustain such deep premium discounts? Would you recommend such a company to a client? Or would the short-term price benefit be too risky to the long-term relationship? Almost always, products are only discounted deeply when something’s wrong.

A wise person once said, “Cheap is expensive.” I should have known better but I fell into this trap a year ago. My wife Cathy and I heard from a friend that a furniture store in our city was selling children’s bedroom furniture at a 50 percent discount. Having six children, we are always looking for a discount, so off we went. We needed to replace a bunk bed and set of drawers for two of our boys. The furniture looked great and the salesman told us we could get the pieces we wanted at half the price charged by the other stores in the area. We were delighted. We dropped about $1,500 on the new bedroom furniture and headed home.

I’m sure you know what’s next. Within three months the frame of the bed was broken into two pieces. As I sat gluing the lowest quality wood frame known to man back together, I was reminded of a lesson I thought I had learned many times before, “You get what you pay for,” dummy. To add insult to injury, when I called the furniture store to complain, the number had been disconnected and the business was gone. At my age I had gotten exactly what I deserved. I have since taken the broken future to the local landfill.

Now, whenever I pass buy the empty retail space once occupied by this “great deal” I’m reminded how easy it is to fall prey to the “I’ve got a deal for you” trap. It doesn’t matter if we are buying insurance, furniture or advertising, as agency marketing experts it’s important that we guard against the temptation to buy solely on price and remember cheap is very, very expensive.

Topics Carriers