Millennial consumers, mobile use and insurance sales

You’ve seen them on their smartphones at the dinner table, during work, at parties, even in the movie theaters while “watching” a movie. Millennials, or those born between 1981 and 2000, have not only taken over the workplace. They are now your biggest market and opportunity.

A recent survey commissioned by AXA Lab, the digital arm of the multinational insurer, and produced by Alpha UX, a company that specializes in getting to know your target market, set out to discover how millennials view insurance. The survey found that most young adults don’t find life insurance “necessary,” with only 16 percent of this U.S. demographic seeing a need for it.

Even so, advisors and insurers can’t ignore the 83.5 million millennials living and working in the U.S. as a market segment.

The report’s findings also provide an insight into Gen Y’s consumer profile:

- 80 percent sleep with or next to their cellphones
- 59 percent use mobile to compare prices while shopping in a traditional store
- 81 percent of U.S. adults ages 18 to 34 have smartphones
- 10 percent of millennials are either mostly offline (8 percent) or almost always offline (2 percent); this means that 90 percent are almost always online and connected (23 percent), mostly online and connected (28 percent), or a mix of both (39 percent)

When AXA Lab and Alpha UX asked millennials to write three adjectives that describe insurance today, their findings shed light on their perception of the industry:

- 23 percent said “expensive”
- 16 percent said “necessary”
- 14 percent said “safe”
- 13 percent said “helpful”
- 11 percent said “important”

The survey was conducted online between February 17-24, 2016 and included responses from 1,175 U.S.-based millennials ages 18 to 35.

Read on to see detailed slides from the AXA Lab/Alpha UX survey. (You can click on the images to enlarge.)

Other characteristics of this generation’s consumer profile include:

- 75 percent would prefer financial services from companies such as Google, Amazon or PayPal.
- In the U.S. alone, millennial consumers will spend $200 billion annually by next year (2017), and $10 trillion over their lifetimes.

When asked, “What is the most important aspect of an insurance proposition for you?” 41 percent said “reliability of coverage,” and 30 percent said “price.”