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Cavemen and that 10% thing
Mike Ahlf
Geico - formerly know as the
Government
Employees
Insurance
Company - have had enormous success with their advertising recently, especially for car insurance.
The "Cavemen" ad spots have been
amazingly brilliant in particular.
However, I was poking around the other day, just checking my insurance rate against a couple other companies, when I noticed a little checkbox in one of the applications: "Are you now, or have you ever been, a customer of GEICO?"
As it turns out, GEICO may save you 10%, but the other companies are likely as not to take it out on you for being a former customer of GEICO later... and whether GEICO can really save you 10% is questionable from the quotes I was getting.
"Your mileage may vary."
[Updated]: So that I'm a bit clearer: checking that little box actually did increase the price that the insurance companies' automated systems quoted me.
Observations
I wonder what their rationale is on that, other than anti-competitive practices.
My guess would be Geico's past monopoly status in some things, and probably some of their business practices as well (some things I looked up seem to indicate that they "save" people money by using a very odd formula for calculating risk, for instance).
They have a monopoly? In what venture?
It really seems odd to penalize people that went to a particular insurance company. Theoretically you want to win those people over or win them back. It's not like they've managed to publicize this policy to prevent people from going to Geico in the first place, which is what you'd have to do for it to make sense as a potential disincentive.
I could maybe sorta understand if were a government entity or contractor charged with insure the uninsurable (thus making people that had to resort to it suspect), but they're private and have historically targetted safer drivers. And besides, there are better ways to tell if someone is more likely to get into an accident or not than who they insured with.
I'm actually pretty curious about this. I'll have to look into it.
http://www.geico.com/about/...
Not a monopoly by such, but they have in the past had a virtual monopoly on the areas they targeted; their past behavior also likely doesn't endear them to their competitors.
Maybe it's just statistical purposes? Certainly wouldn't seem right for them to use it for any other purposes.
Kavey,
Perhaps I was unclear: checking that box actually increased the quote price that they gave me.
Well, if Geico users tend to be more risky drivers than others...
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