Saw a newspaper advertisement for a general insurance service, with the following text prominently displayed:
No Claim Bonus
Of course, people in the insurance industry / those who bought insurance / made claims earlier will immediately understand this as:
If you don’t make any claims in the policy period, you get a bonus
However, assuming most of the people reading this advertisement (and are primary targets) are laymen and won’t understand this “No Claim” terminology, what will they see in this Ad?
No Bonus
You may call that silly, but when I look at the words “No” and “Bonus” near to each other, I naturally assume this company is refusing to pay me bonus (for whatever reason). There is no clarity to teach me that they are actually paying me bonus, for not making any claims.
This whole communication gap could’ve been avoided if the company did some beta testing of its Advertisement text, they would have come up with better alternatives such as:
Bonus for No Claims
Attractive No-claim Bonus
When millions of dollars are spent on advertisement, we can never ‘assume’ things, it is better to be clear, than create a wrong impression in the target readers’ mind.
Naga Chokkanathan,
Director, Presales, CRMIT
