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August 31, 2018 at 07:20 AM
Life Insurance Awareness Month starts Sept. 1, and William Shelow is heading into that month with a feeling that the life industry needs to do more to get people covered.
“We’ve had declining policy counts for a number of years,” Shelow said in a recent interview. “We know there’s a huge coverage gap there.”
(Related: Life Agents Face Internal Awareness Threat: Marvin Feldman)
Shelow is president of LifeMark Partners Inc., a Linthicum Heights, Maryland-based life insurance distributor that’s
He’s also part of a Future of the Industry Committee that’s working with Maddock Douglas, a consulting firm, to look at how consumers see life insurance, and how life products and distribution strategies should evolve next to meet consumers’ needs.
LifeMark itself is trying to innovate by adding cancer tumor DNA sequencing benefits from Wamberg Genomic Advisors. The firm will offer free sequencing benefits to 250,000 life insurance purchasers, and discounted benefits to another 2 million life insurance purchasers.
Shelow hopes his company, and the industry future committee, can do something to help the 70 million U.S. workers who now lack life insurance, and to help make sure that everyone understands how important life insurance is to family financial security.
When a family breadwinner without life insurance dies, “that family can’t afford to pay their mortgage,” Shelow said.
Here are five other things Shelow talked about during the interview.
1. Advertising
Shelow said that he sees life insurers running great ads about their brands, and great ads about saving for retirement.
He wishes he saw more ads that would tell consumers why they need to insure themselves against the risk of death.
For the most part, “there’s not a lot of messaging and advertising about life insurance,” Shelow said.
2. Life Happens
Shelow loves Life Happens’ portfolio of stories about how having, or not having, life insurance has affected real people.
He also loves seeing Danica Patrick, one of the most successful female race car drivers ever, returning as the Life Insurance Awareness Month spokesperson, and he loves seeing programs about Patrick’s participation in the awareness month campaign.
“The more they could get air time aimed at customers, the better,” Shelow said. “Tell a story about what life insurance does.”
