Products January 25, 2008

MassMutual Adopts New Model for Adviser and Plan Sponsor Services

MassMutual has adopted an enhanced regional model for its adviser and plan sponsor service operations that it says offers enhanced synergy between sales and service both before and after a plan is sold.
Reported by

Under the new regional service model, each MassMutual relationship manager and account manager will retain existing account assignments, but as new plans are installed, assignments will be made to align geographically by region, the company said in a news release. This model is designed to deliver relationship consistency between MassMutual, the plan adviser and the plan sponsor, and ensure that clients and advisers are served by a team that is geographically accessible as appropriate.

Four new assistant vice presidents of service have been appointed to lead the four regional service teams:

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  • Joanne Kisiel, Assistant Vice President, Southeast Region – Most recently, Kisiel served as director of new business installation. In this role, she led MassMutual’s National Accounts New Business Installation operation where she and her team achieved top tier customer and adviser satisfaction scores while supporting a rapidly growing number of new plans.
  • Eric Leverson, Assistant Vice President, Northeast Region – Leverson was most recently director of relationship management for the company’s Eastern region. Prior to joining MassMutual, Leverson spent six years with Cigna.
  • Una Morabito, Assistant Vice President, Midwest Region – She joined MassMutual in 1996 and was most recently the director of national accounts, supporting some of MassMutual’s largest and most complex clients with a high degree of expertise and satisfaction.
  • Tracy Tierney-Clifford, Assistant Vice President, West/Southwest Regions – She joined MassMutual in November of 2007 from Putnam Investments where she led the relationship management team supporting the Western region. Prior to that, she served in both plan administration and relationship management roles.

“Our goal is to make it as easy as possible to do business with MassMutual and to deliver the highest level of service possible to advisors, plan sponsors and participants,” said Marie Augsberger, senior vice president and chief operating officer for the company’s Retirement Services Division, in the release.

MassMutual said it will continue to have separate dedicated service teams for its TPA Alliance, Taft-Hartley, and PEO clients.

Data & Research January 23, 2008

Mind Over Matters

They say you get what you pay for – but maybe it just feels like you do.
Reported by
Researchers from the California Institute of Technology and Stanford’s business school have found a link between the sensation of pleasantness that people experience when tasting wine – and its price.

According to a report on CNETnews.com, the researchers found that with the higher priced wines, more blood and oxygen is sent to a part of the brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex – a part of the brain whose activity reflects pleasure. Brain scanning using a method called functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) showed evidence for the researchers’ hypothesis that “changes in the price of a product can influence neural computations associated with experienced pleasantness,” they said, according to the report.

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In fact, the researchers found that people ranked taste of a $45 wine higher than the same wine priced at $5, and the same for a different wine marked $90 and $10 (this is ostensibly evidenced by the data in the chart to the right – but you couldn’t prove it by me).
Of course, that has some interesting opportunities for marketing campaigns. “Contrary to the basic assumptions of economics, several studies have provided behavioral evidence that marketing actions can successfully affect experienced pleasantness by manipulating nonintrinsic attributes of goods.’ Said another way, there are ways to enhance your perceptions of the quality of a product – that have nothing to do with the quality of the product.
“…knowledge of a beer’s ingredients and brand can affect reported taste quality, and the reported enjoyment of a film is influenced by expectations about its quality,” the researchers said.
It’s not just about feeling better about the product, either. The researchers also noted that “…changing the price at which an energy drink is purchased can influence the ability to solve puzzles.”
The study, by Hilke Plassmann, John O’Doherty, Baba Shiv, and Antonio Rangel, was published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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