Identifying Non-adopter Consumer Segments: An Empirical Study on Earthquake Insurance Adoption in Turkey

In recent years, steadily climbing natural disaster losses have increased the need to promote new financial risk transfer mechanisms, including insurance, as a mitigation tool to build resilient communities to recover faster after disaster occurrence. However, while the societal need for such policies is high, demand for natural disaster insurances typically is still low. While there is ample research on positive adoption decisions, reasons for non-adoption has not yet received the attention it deserves. Using the case of earthquake insurance in Turkey, this study investigates how public policy makers and insurance companies can differentiate non-adopter segments and consequently develop targeted strategies to stimulate the uptake of disaster insurance. Our study develops a non-adopter typology consisting of four segments—state reliant positivist, dependers, adversaries and uninformed loners. Differences among segments provide policy makers and insurance companies with meaningful insights to design and consequently introduce affordable natural disaster insurance to the market.