| Popis: |
As an anticipated response to the foreseeable increase in competition, insurance companies in Italy are trying to escape the commodity trap by supplying a wide range of services to their customers. Sociodemographic segmentations have been shown to fail in identifying target groups towards which to concentrate qualified marketing efforts, including pricing policies. This paper proposes a segmentation based on customer-estimated price elasticities which are the operational variables for willingness-to-pay. The authors think that it is the only effective segmentation to give some useful insights in differentiating prices and services, in order to maximise revenues or profits. With respect to the Italian compulsory automotive insurance market, it is proved that customer demand curves and related price elasticities are quite heterogeneous. The tool proposed, exploiting a large amount of the existing willingness-to-pay, seems to offer a good and effective basis for valuable price discrimination at the firm level, also dropping the size of the potential switching rate implicit in a non-efficient price differentiation method. |
