Getting the best out of expressions

BY admin

Angry children staring down from hoardings across the city have captured hearts and minds of millions of parents. Aneesh Khanna, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer, IDBI Federal Life Insurance tells us about the latest campaign and what transpired in getting those adorable faces up there.

By NEETA NAIR

With a bouquet of good child products, the brand was keen to highlight its offerings but soon found that the category was already too crowded. “What’s usually depicted in such life insurance ads is a child asking for something, an arrested moment of thought and then the parent resolves the tension by planning for it. To distinguish between multiple such ads is very difficult. So we thought of ideas to nudge the young parent harder in a manner which is humorous. That’s how we came up with the ‘angry child’ campaign. Through this ad we asked parents how their angry child of today would look at 18 years of age. Clearly, he or she wouldn’t be as cute then. We then followed it up with an interactive radio campaign and digital campaign called ‘the cutest angry baby hunt’,” says Aneesh Khanna, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer, IDBI Federal Life Insurance. Unconventionally, the brand excluded a TVC from its campaign restricting it to Outdoors, Digital and Radio. Khanna explains, “If we were to do a TVC the format would have ended up being the same as the other brands. We thought the outdoor campaign would be more powerful. While outdoor is a passive medium it still emotes, stopping the consumer in his tracks. We were only looking to deliver two things quickly through the hoarding — this is the product we are trying to sell and you will find it here.”

Talking about the challenges faced by the company, Khanna adds, “Being a young insurance company we had a huge challenge. We needed to not only develop our brand but also make it relevant to the people. Awareness was another issue i.e. we needed to tell consumers that we are an insurance company backed by IDBI Bank and Federal Bank. Also, nowadays, most of the advertising gets done under the umbrella of corporate branding. The ad campaign would talk about the company like Khud Ko Kar Buland of Birla Sun Life Insurance and Sar Uthake Jiyo of HDFC. But from the consumer point of view there is no meaningful difference between the two promises. The consumer doesn’t really know why he or she should specifically come to you. We wanted to stay away from that kind of advertising.”

Khanna then goes on to elaborate on how his brand is adopting a different strategy from the competition. “When we say who we are and what we do, it is all attitudinal and image branding, done best by a brand like Nike. While the insurance industry and financial services are also based on emotional and high order planks, the linkage of the promise and the company is often very weak. For e.g. ICICI’s Bande Acche hai – one can argue what about ICICI makes the ‘Bande Acche’? For us to make ourselves relevant to the consumer, we thought it would be better to tell them upfront what products and services we sell,” Khanna states.

Also, what’s interesting is that IDBI Federal Life Insurance has chosen to take the sporting route to brand-building by announcing a bevy of new initiatives in the sports domain. The insurance services provider has committed to cricket coaching through MCA-IDBI Federal Life Insurance Bowling Foundation, taken on associate sponsorship of the ‘Young Heroes’ program to develop grassroots football in the country and title sponsorship of Spice Coast Marathon. “Our role as a life insurance company is that we ensure peace of mind for the insured as well as the family, which basically means that anything you planned for your family is taken care of. So it inspires positive action. Sport is also something which improves lives and leads to a healthier individual and society. That is the reason we narrowed down on sports as part of our brand building efforts. But the big question was what kind of sports should we associate with – something like IPL or do we go down to where there is scope for development. Since our ethos is to inspire positive action we wanted to associate ourselves with development of sports,” says Khanna.

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