Most marketers think insurance is hard to sell because of pricing. They're wrong.

After a decade at PolicyBoss and 18 years across B2B, B2C, and B2B2C marketing, Varun Kaushik has learned one brutal truth: insurance in India doesn't suffer from a pricing problem. It suffers from a trust problem. And trust, unlike pricing, can't be optimized with a performance marketing playbook alone.

In our latest Velocity Podcast episode, Varun, CMO of PolicyBoss, shared frameworks that challenge conventional wisdom about building brands in regulated, trust-dependent categories.

Meet Varun Kaushik: The Marketer Who Sees Marketing as a Rhythm

Varun Kaushik's career spans 18 years across IT infrastructure, cloud services, and now insurance. His first decade was in IT, launching data centers during the cloud boom. Then came insurance, an industry he had "a very different contrarian view about" before joining. A decade at PolicyBoss later, he's learned what he calls "the fine nuances of revenue optimization, looking at the entire funnel view."

But here's what makes his perspective invaluable: "Marketing to me is a rhythm, it's not really a function. It's something in motion." This isn't philosophical musing. "Today a marketer is a revenue driver. It's in a seat of authority as far as the make or break for the next growth chapter of any organization is concerned."

At PolicyBoss, Varun operates as "the conduit between business and tech," ensuring whatever experience they intend to build gets executed "not just on paper but on ground."

The Trust Deficit: Why Insurance Is Different

"You will never interact with an unknown, untrusted entity when it comes to insurance, irrespective of who you are," Varun states flatly.

Think about it. You'll try a new banking app. You'll test a new trading platform. You'll experiment with lending apps offering lower rates. But insurance? Never.

"Insurance in India largely suffers not because of pricing, not because of anything else other than trust," Varun emphasizes. You might try new financial apps for better features, but "when it comes to the subject of insurance, you never interact with an unknown untrusted entity."

This is why PolicyBoss has spent the last decade building "a balance between comparison, convenience, and trusted advisory." They're building "one of India's largest advisory-led insurance buying platforms where there is equal value creation for all three stakeholders, customers, agents, and insurance companies."

The goal? "Reduce the variability in decisioning." Because in insurance, "there are a lot of moving parts in the equation and it does tend to overwhelm due to sheer technicality or sheer information overload."

The B2B2C Pivot: From Call Centers to 40,000 Agent Partners

PolicyBoss's transformation is one of the most dramatic pivots in Indian insurtech. "We used to be entirely B2C at one point of time. We used to operate one of the largest call center operations, and then we pivoted that entirely from B2C to being B2B2C."

How dramatic? "What used to be 90-10 between B2C and B2B2C is reversed today. 90% of our revenues are now coming from the agency channel."

This was enabled by the POSP (Point of Sale Person) guidelines introduced in 2017. The critical distinction: "In the entire realm of insurance intermediaries, there is only one that is the representative of the customer. Everybody else represents the insurance company. And that representative of the customer is actually an insurance broker."

Today, PolicyBoss operates "across over 800 PIN codes with roughly 40,000-odd agents as partners."

What New-Age Insurance Players Got Right

Varun breaks down three core problems that PolicyBoss, Policy Bazaar, and Acko collectively solved:

1. Embedding Trust in the Buying Journey
"How do you embed the trust factor within that buying journey itself? Each has had their own ways of building it around."

2. Moving Beyond Price-Only Comparison
"Getting people into a habit of comparison which is more aided, 360 degrees and less linear towards pricing alone. Because let's be honest, insurance is one of the most price-sensitive retail product categories in the country." The shift Varun witnessed: "It used to be just premium, premium, premium. Now, customers themselves are asking for add-ons."

3. Bringing Comprehensive Protection into Play
"Add-ons were always there. We're talking about a 5-6 decade plus old industry. But the maturity in understanding the awareness, what does that really imply? How does that impact me as an end user?" As claim volumes grew and user maturity increased, "you have lesser preaching to do, more practicality to show."

Why 200+ Active Ads Isn't Overkill, It's Strategy

A look at PolicyBoss's Meta ad library reveals around 200 active ads running simultaneously. Why?

"I figured out what's working in what part of the country and how. And that's what the number is for," Varun explains. "A person sitting in Delhi versus somebody sitting in Chennai versus somebody in Kolkata versus somebody in Himachal, different things with different people."

The reality: "Today in India underwriting has matured to pin codes even for car insurance. I cannot afford to be generic. I cannot afford to be seen as a generalist."

Take school bus insurance operators, "most of them are semi-literate. Yes, they use WhatsApp. Yes, they use Facebook. But they are not MBA grads. They are very grounded, earthy people having a very tight control over a very niche segment."

To reach them requires "that level of depth in messaging, that level of pointedness in the outreach, and that level of relatable call to action specific to that niche, specific to that particular product category, specific to that seller set."

Bottom line? "It's not a one-size-fits-all strategy. That's the reason why there is that high count."

This is where AI-driven creative intelligence becomes essential. Managing 200+ variations across pin codes and personas without tools like Hawky means drowning in data or burning out creative teams.

The Secret Sauce: Understanding Aspiration

"One small part of the secret sauce I can share: I have very clearly understood the aspiration of my target audience and I have credible, sincere, scientific ways of understanding this. I have commissioned researchers to just understand: if this agent in Chennai, what does he really want in life? How can I get him get there?"

The approach? "These are the typical questions a wealth manager asks you for creating a wealth management plan. I borrowed it from them, curated it for my lead."

This led to a fundamental brand positioning shift. "I am not an intellectual heavy kind of a brand. Neither is the industry. Then why pose as a literati? I'm grounded, I'm earthy, I'm rustic. That's who I am. And I take great pride in being that way because business is happening that way."

Brand Building vs. Performance: The Real Balance

"When you are trying to go to market with a product as complex as insurance, you cannot just be brand-led or you cannot just be performance-led. You have to have that ideal mix where your brand is doing its job, your performance is doing its job."

Timing matters. "October to March is a heavy spend zone for renewal businesses. What that effectively means is it gives us an opportunity to invest in the remaining four to five months in brand building efforts. I don't wait for October to March to do my brand building. I do it before so that by the time the renewal cycle comes, I have had a sufficient receptivity already created."

But this only works if marketing ties directly to business outcomes. "It's one thing to say I have marketing automation, another to say have you been able to attribute it down to how it's defining into revenue metrics. Not talking ROI, not talking ROAS, that's clichéd. Tell me how does the marketing effort boil down to a CM1? How does that boil down to a CM2?"

The stakes: "If I don't align myself with business at this depth, sales will eat me for lunch, management will eat me for breakfast, and operations gonna eat me for dinner."

Key Takeaways

• Trust, not pricing, is the barrier. You'll never interact with an unknown entity for insurance, even if you'll try new apps for banking or lending. Build platforms that reduce decision variability.

• Pin code-level precision is strategy, not overkill. PolicyBoss runs 200+ active ads because different people in Delhi, Chennai, and Kolkata need different messages. Underwriting matured to pin codes; marketing must follow.

• Understand aspiration, not just pain points. Commission research to understand what your agents really want in life. Borrow wealth management frameworks to make acquisition more intelligent.

• Marketing is the nervous system, not a function. Align to business metrics down to CM1 and CM2, not just ROI and ROAS. Otherwise, sales, management, and ops will eat you alive.