Niche products can be very profitable for insurers, but no matter how large the company, marketing those products can be expensive. When marketing a niche product, you generally produce a low volume of high-quality materials, which drives up your unit cost considerably, says Gregg Cromeans, director of individual life marketingfor Prudential Financial. We recently launched a new niche product in our portfolio, which required us to make some educated guesses about the type and volume of support materials needed.

From an economic standpoint, Cromeans says, one of the challenges Prudential studied was whether there was a new way the company could approach the problem. We did print on demand in the past, but to address the question about making [the marketing] more relevant to the customer, we thought personalizing the marketing material would be an effective way to bring the conversation down to a one-on-one basis, he says.

Cromeans was aware of what Xerox offered through its Global Services unit and went through Prudentials consolidated fulfillment area to find other possible vendors, he states. Two other solution providers joined Xerox as possible candidates. One factor we considered was two of the quotes were from vendors that were focused on building a solution as a means of attaining the print business, says Cromeans. The approach Xerox took focused primarily on our needs, and it frankly didnt care where the output went, nor did I.