IC-88 Marketing and Public Relations
IC-88 Marketing and Public Relations is a 30-credit optional paper open to both streams. It covers how insurance is sold and how insurers manage their reputation — and it is more specific to insurance than the title suggests.
Marketing a promise is not marketing a product
Most marketing theory assumes a tangible product a customer can inspect. Insurance breaks that assumption. The customer buys something intangible, pays for it before receiving anything, hopes never to use it, and cannot judge quality until the moment of a claim — by which time the buying decision is long past.
That is why insurance marketing is its own subject, and why the paper spends time on trust, intermediaries and service quality rather than on advertising alone.
What the paper deals with
- Marketing fundamentals — the marketing mix, segmentation, targeting and positioning, applied to insurance.
- The services dimension — intangibility, inseparability, variability and perishability, and what each implies.
- Distribution channels — agents, brokers, bancassurance and direct, and the economics of each. For the channel management side in depth, see IC-103.
- Customer relationship management — acquisition versus retention.
- Public relations — reputation, communication and crisis handling.
- Market research — how insurers learn what customers want.
- Regulatory constraints on selling — what may and may not be promised.
Confirm against your edition's syllabus.
The topics that repay study
The four services characteristics. Be able to name each and give an insurance example of the problem it creates — this is the paper's most examinable idea.
Channel comparison. Know the trade-offs, not just the list: cost, reach, control and quality differ sharply across channels.
Retention economics. Candidates who can say why retaining a policyholder beats acquiring one — in cost terms — answer a recurring question well.
PR in a crisis. Short, specific, and regularly examined.
How to prepare
The temptation with IC-88 is to answer from general business knowledge. Resist it: the exam rewards the textbook's framing, and a sensible answer that is not the syllabus answer scores nothing.
Certena serves 64 verified IC-88 questions. It is a smaller bank than our general insurance subjects, so treat the questions as a diagnostic for weak definitions rather than as your only revision.
Pairs well with IC-90 Human Resources Management if you want two management optionals in one sitting.