Travel product insures student success
28 June 2011
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Business students from Bournemouth University receive prize from the Bournemouth Insurance Institute (BII) after creating a new insurance product. |
A group of ingenious Business students from Bournemouth University have received a £1,000 prize from the Bournemouth Insurance Institute (BII) after creating a new insurance product.
The 20 first-year students from the University’s BA (Hons) in Business Studies designed a new multi-tier travel insurance package for the over 50s which judges from the Institute agreed would be good enough to be offered as a real product.
The BII – one of 60 local branches of the Chartered Insurance Institute - set the challenge as part of a Marketing unit on the course. BU academic Dr Julie Robson, Education Secretary for the BII and Director of Enterprise for the BII said the assignment started four years ago to raise awareness of career opportunities for graduates in the risk and insurance sector after the CII identified that the sector was not appealing to graduates as a career choice.
“This project continues to be a great success. It not only raises awareness of the variety of careers that are available to graduates in the insurance industry but it also provides a challenging real life business assignment that enables our students.to put the theory they have learnt into practice. Once again the students have excelled and produced some excellent ideas for potential new products.”
Student Thomas Bowman from Dartford in Kent said that the group put in a lot of hours over the 10-week life of the project researching and developing a product they felt would appeal to their target market. “We looked at all of the different markets and realised that there are a lot of car insurers, for example, who offer a good range for the over 50s but not enough competition in the travel market,” said Thomas.
Fellow student Nick Springall from Leighton Buzzard in Bedfordshire described their product as having three ‘levels’ of insurance. “We wanted to give people a choice so those who are looking for a luxury option can choose the highest level and people who wanted less cover could have that as an option,” Nick explained.
The pair agreed that the biggest challenge for such a large number of participants was organisation and both paid tribute to fellow student Cory Williams who led the group as Managing Director for the project. Cory was joined by Sally Kemp, Joe Wales and Natalie Mott to present the project to the BII. Hannah Ogilvie and Holly Cleanthi were also praised for their part of the presentation which focused on pricing which tutor Trevor Clements said was the best he has seen for that particular section.
“Keeping 20 people on task and on time to bring it all together was definitely the biggest challenge,” said Thomas.
“A project like this definitely gives you the skills in how to manage the task,” agreed Nick, “and to be named the best group is a great reward for all of the hard work we put in over the last few weeks.”
Christiana Tsaousi, Lecturer in Marketing in the University’s Business School, praised the students for being so focused and coming through so successfully.
“The students did all of the work – researching the market, finding the right product and developing it, devising the promotional strategy and the advertising – everything to create the complete product; and the results prove how hard they’ve worked,” she enthused.
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