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Serious Games to Excite Consumers About Life Insurance

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Via: Insurance & Technology - AXA Looks to Gamification, Serious Games and iPad to Excite Consumers About Life Insurance

 Connie O'Brien, SVP of Internet strategy and development, tells Insurance & Technology that with life insurance ownership at an all-time low, insurers must engage a new audience.

 New York-based life insurer AXA Equitable has never been shy about promoting the necessity of life insurance and annuities. After all, the company is famous for personifying this need as the "800-pound gorilla in the room." With a soft life insurance market, the company is redoubling its efforts to acquire new policyholders, using technology as an enticement.

In September, AXA released an online game, Pass it On, which uses a "Serious Game" journey as a metaphor for the journey of life and the opportunities to purchase insurance coverage for loved ones after death.


Players guide their virtual families to a better financial future by saving game currency, managing expenses, and making important decisions about life insurance, the company says. There are also sweepstakes and charitable components.

 Demonstrating how life products, which can be complex, work, in language or experiences that consumers understand intrinsically, is a major goal of AXA's latest initiatives.

 This month, the company released an iPad app that explains in detail how its Athena Indexed Universal Life product works. In addition to standard fare like calculators, the app allows users to customize their needs and personal situations, and uses quizzes to educate users about life insurance coverage.

"It started as an interactive storybook for kids. We wanted to leverage the technology in order to teach people what the benefits of that product specifically are," O'Brien says. '"While our issues are certainly more serious than popping bubbles and twinkling stars, we thought it would be a good way to bring to life the content so that people could see not only why they're going through the process, but also get a really good understanding of why you need our product."

An ancillary benefit of the app is that it contains much of the sales material that distributors would normally give interested parties in a paper form. Making that available in a digital form is a way for AXA to make actually signing up for a policy easy, O'Brien adds.