One recent commentator believes that the emergence of online marketplaces will make risks (and therefore insurance) more similar. They believe that the ideal of being able to show comparisons squeezes products into more and more common forms.
We do a bit of comparison work around here, and we have tended to find the reverse. Over our time in the market (three and a half years) products have proliferated and we still don’t compare and research them all. This was counter to our expectations: perhaps five to ten years before we were seeing a trend towards fewer insurers, and we might have believed the idea of fewer products too.
On the other hand in many products we do see what appears to be more sorting into categories: once upon a time mobiles were mainly clam-shells that you flipped open, now they are mainly candy-bars with big touchscreens and no mechanical buttons. To that extent maybe the ‘more the same’ camp are right. But within the category the diversity is nothing short of amazing. Today your telephone is a more personal item, perhaps, than an old-fashioned diary might once have been.