Karthi Marshan, Executive Vice President & Head - Group Marketing, Kotak Mahindra Bank Limited, talks of banking on the customer’s experience to get first-hand insights and create relevant products, successful initiatives such as Kotak Junior and social banking with Jifi, and why the brand prefers not to have a tagline for its communication
By Saloni Dutta
Q] What are the new strategies that you have adopted at Kotak Mahindra to keep pace with the ever-evolving consumer?
Authenticity versus propaganda - that is at the heart of what is new. There was a time when we could get away with puffy advertising slogans and emotionally moving ads with little brand recall. Today, if the customer’s experience and my advertising or communications are not in sync, they will be on social media, telling the whole world about it. So it is vital to be authentic. The second principle is 100% collaboration with the customer for everything. When we create the product, we brainstorm with the customer via Internet and social media and ask them for feedback and build our products based on that. Third, our communication also is largely inspired by consumer-speak. For example, when the bank turned 25, we asked people how it felt to be 25 and turned the best responses into dramatized advertisements.
I hope to get to a point where if you complain about something on Twitter, some other customer of mine pipes up instead of me. For the best brands in the world this actually happens. And I aspire for that to happen for us as well, some day.
Q] How have your advertising and marketing spends changed over the last few years?
Taking a benchmark of 2010 to now, in 2010 the bulk of my money would have been in Television and a little in Outdoor. Of course, there would have been a few other things like Cinema, Radio, Internet, etc. Today, spending on the Internet is as high as 20-25% of my money, Television is still about 50%, and the rest of it is tucked in between. But Digital in all forms has really taken the place of a strong second medium.
Q] While planning the communication for a marketing plan, what are the essentials of your brief to the creative agency and what is your level of involvement in the designing of the creative?
My team would say that my level of involvement is too high. Uday Kotak also gets involved with every major new initiative in communication through the process. And I actually prefer it that way, because if the CEO has a voice in deciding whether to air it or not, then he has to be a part of the journey. Most of our ads cost us about a crore or so, and if you are taking that kind of a decision, then everyone has to be involved. There is a lot of brainstorming even among the partner agencies, whether it is media, social media, PR, creative… everyone gets together and we brainstorm. Eventually, nobody knows whose idea it was, which is fine. We share the credit generously as well.
My first brief to the creative agency is that is that if I blocked out all the Kotak logos in the ad, you should still be able to say it is an ad for Kotak. In 2006, when I took up this job, people used to remember Kotak ads 6% of the times. Today, they do it 88% of the time. The learning is very clear: the brand has to be in the story. My second brief is that we have to make a distinctive and relevant promise. The third thing is that we don’t make empty promises.
Q] How has Kotak Junior worked out in terms of product and reach?
The insight in the junior campaign is that children love to act grown-up. So, for them, holding a piece of plastic in their hands is really an empowering thing. By law, we weren’t allowed to give children debit cards, so we gave them a membership card that looked like a debit card but it allowed them this feeling. It is by far one of our best-selling products.
The marketing principle at the heart of it is getting under the skin of the consumer. There were two insights, one was the child insight, and second was the parent insight. One year before we launched Junior, we launched a product specifically for women called Silk, and built on a similar approach - What do women really care about? How can we find a way to demonstrate respect for women disproportionate to the rest of the world? That year, Silk was our best-selling product. At the end of the year, we stumbled on a nugget of information - every Silk product had a minor account associated with it; and together, both accounts held much more money in them. We took the partnership idea and built the Junior product around that. The heart of the Junior product is not the bank account; it is a long-term savings account. We offer a 10-year RD at the best rates possible. We tell the child that every quarter, if your Mum has put money into the account as promised, we will give you tickets to a children’s movie at PVR. So the child also has an incentive to act on this, and I believe we are beginning some financial education.
Q] What has been the response to Kotak’s social banking with Jifi?
We put together two insights - that people are comfortable being online and they hang out on social media. And Jifi is the product that came up. So it was a product born off social media, used by social media and in social media. The third axis is really a marketing axis, that when you consume my product via social media, every time it is an advertisement for me. The response has been incredible. While 25% of my regular customers are using netbanking and mobile banking, 90% of Jifi customers use netbanking and mobile banking. That is a good parameter of saying how we got that segment right. We are hoping to launch more Jifi variants soon, addressing many more micro segments.
Q] What are your BTL activities to increase consumer engagement?
Like most other banks, we did our Pradhanmantri Jan Dhan Yojna camp. One of my favourite activities have been Aadhar camps in our branches; they also helped me as there is a single identifier to track a customer with, and offer services. Also, there is value in being of service to someone even before he or she is a customer. We also do health check-ups, the facility to automatically pay all your utility bills if you register with the bank, etc.
Q] What differentiates you from your competition?
There is no meaningful headline that can stitch it all together, which is why we don’t have any tagline, because as soon as you have a tagline, it sounds pompous. We hope that we are doing a good job in trying to get a deep insight into what are a consumer’s life problems and taking what we do for a living and trying to find a fit. It is never a plain vanilla bank account or credit card; there is always a match between some dimension of your life which is special to you and what we can do about it. For example, one of our hottest selling credit cards is the Kotak PVR credit card, targeted at heavy movie-goers. You get free movie tickets every month. It has the highest spends in our overall credit card portfolio and lowest delinquency rates.
Q] What are the emerging consumer trends and future opportunities in the banking sector?
One of the things we will see is the adoption of basic financial services products in large measure due to technology which makes it much more efficient. We will start moving from a heavily cash economy to a largely electronic economy. Five years from now, it will be a very different India from a banking perspective.
ABOUT THE BRAND
Established in 1985, the Kotak Mahindra Group is one of India's leading financial services conglomerates. In February 2003, Kotak Mahindra Finance Ltd (KMFL) received a banking licence from the Reserve Bank of India and became the first non-banking finance company in India to become a bank - Kotak Mahindra Bank. Kotak Mahindra Bank offers complete retail financial solutions for varied customer requirements. One can purchase, redeem, switch and even make systematic investments in mutual fund schemes of over 20 Indian Mutual Fund houses. Kotak Mahindra Bank has over 624 branches and over 1,149 ATMs spread across 357 locations in the country.
FACTS
Media Agency – Maxus Global
Creative Agency – Cartwheel
Social Media Agency – IBS Unified (Interface Business Solution)
Digital Media Agency – Maxus Global
OOH Agency – DDB Mudramax & Madison Outdoor Media Solutions
PR Agency – Genesis Burson-Marsteller
Marketing Tip
Whatever the product category, spend a day in the shoes of the customer, you’ll know what to do. It is a goldmine of insights.
CMO FILE
Karthi Marshan heads marketing for Kotak Mahindra Bank, including all verticals such as insurance, banking, brokerage, asset management et al. Previously, Marshan has headed marketing at IDBI Bank, and co-founded Sharekhan. He started his career as a copy-writer, then moved to account management at Grey Worldwide, and subsequently produced television content for Sony India. Prior to joining Kotak, Marshan helped turn around an ailing DTH business in Sydney. An alumnus of IIM Bangalore, Marshan has been trying to escape the madness of Mumbai all his adult life. Bangalore is his favourite city in India, Goa comes a close second.
