Health Insurance: Capitalizing on a New Market Opportunity

The Situation

The Affordable Care Act’s health insurance exchanges created a new market opportunity that could change the competitive landscape for health insurance companies. But they also presented significant challenges for any company designing and communicating its offer–leading to this healthcare research study.

The client, a regional healthcare insurance provider, engaged Artemis Strategy Group to help them determine how to communicate with a new market and what to emphasize in their communications to the 15 percent of Americans who are uninsured. One challenge was that the target audience was incredibly diverse. Their motivations and likely shopping behaviors were not well understood. Add to this the complexity of the health insurance purchase process on the exchanges. The client requested insights on the multiple components of the consumer’s decision process: deciding to shop for insurance, shopping online through the market, and finally, selecting their insurance offer.

Our Recommendation

We designed and conducted several streams of research among the target uninsured audience and, separately, among community/health leaders to provide systemic perspective. The research thoroughly probed how people without health insurance think and make decisions about an intangible, complicated product with which they have limited experience. Our study results identified a core set of common motivational messages to reach this diverse audience, provided guidance on how to shape the offer and offered insights on shopping behavior that guided design and process.

The Outcome

A key insight came from understanding the frustrations uninsured people had experienced in prior efforts to obtain insurance and the reassurances they would need to renew their efforts. The array of new knowledge gleaned from research helped our client to develop a consistent positioning and go-to-market strategy for this developing opportunity.