We believe life insurance is about enabling people to live more by providing living benefits. We believe that the new-age customers, ‘Life Maximisers’ are looking at living life from a very different perspective. It is no longer about living a templated life such as focusing on your child’s education, their marriage and preparing for retirement. It is more about customers achieving multiple life goals in a shorter span of time. The definition of life goals is undergoing a change, and just to substantiate this, we conducted India’s Life Goal Preparedness Survey to understand millennials’ aspirations and their life goals. As per this survey, one of the emerging life goals of Indians is to pursue entrepreneurship, where one in every ten Indians wants to start something new or pursue a parallel career. Further travel is also catching up as a new-age life goal among Indians where one in four respondents in the survey want to travel abroad or travel to new exotic locations within a certain time frame. Millennials today are also talking about the need to remain fit and healthy. So these are emerging as new age, unconventional life goals of India. We see ourselves as the enablers of Life Goals, supported by our fund management expertise and a proven fund performance track record. And we are constantly refining our holistic delivery in terms of products, service infrastructure, sales processes and marketing-communication to fulfil our promise.
Q] What are some of the interesting BTL activities, sales promotions that you have engineered to increase consumer engagement?
Our BTL activities are integrated deeply into the entire marketing mix, to solve business problems or leverage opportunities. One of our most popular and engaging consumer initiatives was #36SecPlankChallenge campaign to launch the 36-Critical Illness product. To participate in the initiative, we asked people to shoot a video holding plank for only 36 seconds and upload it using the hashtag (#36SecPlankChallenge) on any social media platform. Participants could challenge friends and family to do the plank by tagging them on these videos. For every hashtag, we contributed monetarily to Hrudaya Foundation, a Hyderabad-based healthcare organization dedicated towards curing children with heart disorders. The digital campaign saw several corporate honchos, CEOs of competing brands, Indian professional badminton player SainaNehwal, Olympians, Commonwealth Games Gold Medalist GeetaPhogat and India’s first female medalist at Paralympic Games Deepa Malik take up the #36secPlankChallenge. We took this forward and conducted a Plankathon in Pune, an on-ground consumer engagement initiative. We had 2,353people holding a plank together for a minute and this got us into the 2 Guinness Book of World Records. #36SecPlankChallenge campaign saw more than 1.2 lakh participants, making it one of the most engaging consumer initiatives.
Q] What is the market share of Bajaj Allianz Life in the life insurance category and what is the target market share? We crossed several key milestones this year in our journey towards becoming India’s life goal enablers. We witnessed a 25% growth in individual rated new business premium in FY 2018-19, which is significantly higher than the industry’s growth rate of 9% and that of the private life insurers by 12.5%. Going forward, we would like to be one of the most preferred and admirable brands within the life insurance space
Q] Can you tell us the insight behind your recent campaign #UnMissableMeeting?
Engrossed in chasing their life goals, one being gifting parents a foreign trip or that expensive cellphone, etc., millennials don’t realise that the best gift ageing parents can have is quality time with them. The idea was to tell an engaging story and put across a point that fulfilling family goals leads to individual life goals. We want to fuel conversations around life goals in a manner that is contextual and strikes the right emotional chord with ‘life maximisers’.
Q] Earlier you ad roped in the Dancing Uncle and conducted the #36SecPlankChallenge for your life goals done campaign. What kind of response did that get?
We believe a series of differentiated yet relevant initiatives will help us build a high engaging brand with efficient investments. Dancing Uncle garnered 6 million plus views and #36SecPlankChallenge got us participation from over 1.2 lakh people. Both these campaigns got us an earned media to the tune of Rs 6 crores. Many such initiatives including the web series #GameOfLifeGoals and #GraveyardOfGoals impact brand love. As per the BrandzMillward Kantar report, Bajaj Allianz Life is among the top 10 riser brands with an increase in 40% brand value over the previous year.
Q] What was the marketing mix for the campaign and which medium was the focus of your ad spends? What are the brand’s overall spends in a year?
The marketing mix is a function of marketing objective and business task at hand. Television has a least cost per thousand reach and is the most potent medium for driving emotional connect, hence it dominates our offline spends. However, for all the campaigns, Digital is at the core of our conceptualization and planning. Digital continues to be central to all our marketing activities.
Q] What kind of trends are you seeing in the investment and insurance category?
Powered by tech and analytics there is a greater emphasis on the simplification of process and providing unified and desirable experience across touch points. While the entire financial sector still has to cover a long distance, the financial literacy levels are on the rise. Meaningful product innovations, such as Return of Mortality Charges and AI-powered customer services are also increasing.
Q] Who is your biggest competition?
We believe our products offer greater value, depending on an individual’s life goals and risk appetite, as compared to other traditional investment categories. For a holistic financial planning, life insurance products are fundamental to the entire mix of your financial portfolio. Recently released, Bajaj Allianz Life India’s Life Goal Preparedness Survey indicates that life insurance is the most preferred investment option towards achieving 60% of life goals.
Q] Which markets have been contributing greatly to the growth of the brand? Looking ahead which areas do you see as potential growth drivers?
The top eight towns are contributing greatly to the growth of the brand, while we continue to retain our dominance in the mass market and Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets. Our increasing focus on mass affluent, new distribution partnerships and online opportunity will drive next level of growth.
Q] What were the challenges for the brand in the market? And what opportunities do you see going forward?
The challenge for us has been to leverage the rapidly emerging opportunities driven by tech and data. We see tremendous opportunities emanating from increasing adoption of BOT, ML and Voice which we believe can help us connect with customers effectively, in addition to enhancing business efficiencies. Similarly, we are constantly thinking of ways to connect dots from the voluminous data getting generated, maximise the potential of analytics and impact corresponding marketing ‘actionables’ in an agile manner. I guess it is all about striking the right balance of focus for what is important now and how we can be best placed for tomorrow.
