By Saloni Dutta
Sanjay Tripathy, Senior Executive Vice President and Head, Marketing, Products and Direct Channels, HDFC Life talks about the company’s recent campaign that uses birthdays as a hook to reach the target audience, increased focus on digital and e-commerce platforms and efforts to create conversations with consumers
Q] HDFC Life has completed 13 years in India. What are some of the cornerstones of its journey?
The company is the first private sector life insurer to be flagged off by IRDA in 2000. Our brand journey started in December, 2004, when we came up with ‘Sar Utha Ke Jiyo’ as our core brand thought. Our research brought to the fore the insight that an individual doesn’t want to be a burden on his family and that he doesn’t want his family to depend on anyone after his death.
With ‘Sar Utha Ke Jiyo’ we captured the imagination of people as we created relevance of life insurance to them. This helped the brand clearly differentiate itself among eight to nine players at that time and made it relevant to the target segment, SEC A & B, aged between 25 and 45 years, mostly male, primarily middle class. This helped us establish a separate brand identity for ourselves. Even after 13 years, ‘Sar Utha Ke Jiyo’ is still relevant and is the longest running brand philosophy in the industry.
Q] What are the insights behind the brand’s new campaign?
HDFC Life was one of the first brands to advertise and encourage buying of child plans. We wanted to take this concept further and own an occasion for buying a child plan. Parents with young children may not necessarily think about the child’s secure future so early, so we decided to use birthdays to speak to parents and encourage them to opt for long-term financial planning for a child’s future. Our research also reiterated that for parents, birthdays are always relevant and buying a product on a child’s birthday will remind them to pay the premium every year.
Q] How do you choose media vehicles for different sets of communication from the brand?
We define a core campaign communication thought and objective, which can be expressed through multiple mediums. We always follow a 360-degree approach for all our communications, with TV being the dominant medium, followed by print, OOH, radio, and digital. In the insurance and BFSI sector, campaigns are mostly to create awareness, which then moves to consideration and preference. We decide our media mix based on the campaign objective. TV still plays a major role in terms of creating awareness, while print has come down over the years. We also use contextual OOH media in metros and mini metros. Our digital spends have increased significantly to more than 30% of our marketing budget.
Q] What are the recent digital initiatives undertaken by the brand?
The purchase funnel has seen a change with the emergence of digital. We have made rapid strides to remain at the forefront of innovation and digital enablement for our customers. We were the first company in the life insurance space to have a responsive web design, i.e. the same website across platforms — be it a computer screen, mobile or tablet. As a brand we also look to leverage technology so that the consumer experience is made easier, in terms of removing barriers like delayed receipt of policy papers, insurance policy conversion, etc.
Our sales force is equipped with tablets, which helps consumers take instant decisions and ensures faster delivery of end product to the customer. We are working on how technology can break more barriers and investing a lot more in content and conversation.
Q] What is the brand’s approach to social media? What are the challenges you face here?
We have over 17 lakh fans on our Facebook page, one of the biggest in the BFSI industry in India. We engage with people on our Facebook page by building stories around life and leverage occasions like festivals to connect better. We have built our property across social media brands like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn and other platforms to ensure maximum reach. We have 81,000 followers on Twitter, 17 lakh fans on Facebook and our LinkedIn page has more than 25,000 followers, making us one of the most followed on that platform.
We recently created a YouTube page which carries videos not just for our products but our communication campaigns, customer education, customer service, like what kind of an insurance plan is right for you, how much insurance you need, how you can pay your policy premium, and we can embed this message for our consumers in our communication. We are also going to start a corporate blog to interact with customers and shareholders.
Q] What is the brand’s presence and activity in Tier II and Tier III markets?
We are pretty strong in the top 100 cities among private players. We try to reach the entire country through our campaigns, making sure that the communication is designed to appeal to customers across India. We do a lot of targeted emailer campaigns. By now, we have sold online term policies in more than 500 cities. Our primary aim is to take all products online and create pull for them so that customers are not restricted to the brand network.
Q] What are the challenges that you feel the insurance industry faces today?
Regulatory changes have slowed down the sector in the last couple of years. The other problem is GDP degrowth, due to which financial savings are lower. Real estate and gold are being preferred as they give more than expected returns. Low economic returns have affected distribution network; the number of agents have reduced from 27 lakh to 21 lakh, in the last three to four years.
Q] What are the other brand activities that HDFC Life is undertaking to strengthen its consumer connect?
We did a music video 6-7 years back with ‘Sar Utha Ke Jiyo’ as the theme song. In 2008, we tied up with Rajasthan Royals for the Indian Premier League. We feel the need to be seen contextually where people are present. Rajasthan Royals as a team performed better than expected and lived up to our essence of ‘Sar Utha Ke Jiyo’. We also associated with Spelling Bee for around five seasons. It was a perfect way to reach parents. For our recent campaign, if people order birthday cakes, we send extra candles through which we aim to make parents realise that soon their children will grow up and their needs will increase. All our engagement and activation campaigns and experiential activities are aimed at generating that thought for the future in the minds of the consumer and link it to the brand.
Q] Do you have a different marketing strategy to target each age group?
Yes. For women, we went into content-focused marketing and made a special Facebook page to engage them. We did a similar thing with youth, focusing on new jobs and their other needs. Q] What change has the company seen in terms of marketing spends over the last few years? Marketing spends have not really changed in the last couple of years because the market is in a difficult time. But digital spends have gone up significantly, from 5-6% three years earlier to about 30% now.
Feedback: saloni.dutta@exchange4media.com
