Mr. Karthik Raman is the Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer at IDBI Life Insurance, a brand that has invested heavily into the category of sports. In the following authored account he talks about IDBI's popular 'Childsurance' campaign, everything non-sports and cutting the clutter.
"As a brand we have always chosen to go on an off beaten path. Be it our sports and fitness initiatives or our various campaigns across the year. Our messaging style of hope and humour has helped us stand apart in the cluttered market space. A striking example of this was our Childsurance campaign.
Children’s future solutions are the second most popular life insurance plans in India. This is because most studies point towards the fact that Indian parents save and invest widely in insurance for the future of their kids. They contribute about 20% to our sales portfolio and remain an important category for the company. We wanted to launch a child campaign to drive sales and build positive disposition for the brand through awareness.
With a bouquet of child products in our kitty, as a brand we were keen to highlight our offerings but soon found that the category was already too crowded. What’s usually depicted in life insurance ads in this category is a child asking for something, an arrested moment of thought and then the parent resolving the tension by planning for it. To distinguish between multiple such ads is clearly difficult. So, we came up with an idea that would nudge the young parent harder in a manner which is humorous. That’s how the ‘angry baby’ campaign came up.
Our company captured the hearts and minds of millions of parents in India with the angry baby hoardings plastered across the skylines of 110 Indian cities. In the month of September, 2015, our company launched an outdoor promotion for the children’s future solutions with the ‘Childsurance’ campaign.
The outdoor creative 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. It was then followed up with an interactive radio campaign and digital campaign called ‘the cutest angry baby hunt’. Apart from high-impact activations in prominent malls across key metros to hunt the cutest angry baby, our company also launched 33 on-air short radio films featuring children for their campaign. In the phase II, an educative radio programme, ‘Badon ki Pathshala’, was launched that enabled young parents to share and learn from the experience and enables us to bing celeb moms, child psychologists and financial advisors on the same platform. The show gave tips on good parenting, financial planning, understanding and tackling the developmental stages of children from 0-8 years.
Unconventionally, we excluded a TVC from this campaign and restricted it to Outdoors, Digital and Radio. The idea worked for us - despite being a passive medium, it managed to stop the consumer in his tracks.
The series of awards won and superlative brand scores achieved during the period bear testimony to the success of the campaign. We won a Gold in the Radio Effectiveness Category for the Childsurance Radio Film Festival and Bronze in the Best Use of Celebrity Endorsement for Badon Ki Pathshala at the prestigious Asian Customer Engagement Forum (ACEF). We also won Gold in the Social Media Category at the Public Relations
Council of India and won the Most Effective Use of Radio in an activation campaign at the Excellence in Radio Awards (ERA) by India Radio Forum. Our consideration scores moved up 5% and our partner banks’ total awareness increased from 81% in March-August 2015 to 99% between Sept'15-Nov'15 during the campaign period.
One of the biggest challenges for marketers today is fragmentation. This is not just in terms of the proliferation of brands in various categories, but also in terms of consumer interests and the way they engage in those interests. A few years ago, you could advertise on the networks; sponsor a few big sports or events and rest assured that your brand message was being delivered. Now, you have dozens of media avenues with content that draws passionate followers. This is landscape that is much more diverse with the impact of social media and new trends and passions emerging every day!
Our campaign idea thank fully allowed us to break through the clutter and delivered the message powerfully. It gave us an opportunity to add value to the experience of participants and align with their values through something that they truly care about – the future and well being of their little stars!"
