Exclusive | Khud Ko Kar Buland, Birla Sun Life's new campaign

Insurance is a very old category in the country. Post nationalization it has been close to 15 years and there are about 24 leading players and more than 2 million distributors in the industry. According to media experts, Insurance has been the highest ad spending categories over the decade. However, the penetration levels are 15-16% percent. Thus it poses is a huge opportunity and a challenge for any marketer.

Insurance or Life insurance is relevant to anyone who has somebody who is financially dependent on him. About 40% of the industry business comes in the months of January, February and March every year. That simply means people are not sure of what role insurance plays in their lives. Is it a saving instrument, is it an investment avenue, is it a means of protection or is it just a tax saving device.

Birla Sun Life is one such company which recently touched a million hearts by their latest campaign. To get deeper insights about this emotional campaign, we at Adgully caught up with Ajay Kakar, ‎Chief Marketing Officer, Aditya Birla Group - Financial Services.

Concept

What we did was, we tried to look at all the advertising across the category over the years. So we saw the opportunity the category truth has not been taken yet, has not been appropriated and if we can do that maybe we can appropriate it and brand Birla Sun Life Insurance. So we thought of doing this campaign by revisiting the question “Hum aap ke hain kaun.” What we thought was life is uncertain, but role of insurance is to provide certainty and security in an unsecure world.

So we thought that we will do the campaign because one, whether you like it or not there is uncertainty in life. Secondly is where you can do nothing about the uncertainty but you can decide how to live despite this uncertainty and three, you have to build confidence within. And that’s where comes the dialogue in the ad, “Honi ko kaun rok sakta hain, par honi bhi aap ko kaha rok sakti he, apno aur apne ke sapno ko karo surakshit, Khud Ko kar Buland.”

So what we are trying to say is that, what life has in store for us, none of us know but how we want to live our lives, only you and I should decide. We have to make ourselves strong from within. We are saying that Khud ko kar Buland is the spirit which helps you live life with confidence and fight the uncertainties around you.

Story line

When we were discussing the brief, we discussed the line, who knows what the future has in store for you. Nobody can predict the future. But only you should and can decide your future. So it was a huge creative league that the agency took by taking one family which interestingly has all the uncertainties, whether its health uncertainty of the child, the child’s future uncertainty, then you have death as the wife is no more, there is job uncertainty.

The agency took one family’s story but it could be ghar ghar ki kahani. And instead of the traditional one, we saw a moving story where we focused on very few people. The story is not about autism, the story is about spirit. Honestly, the story is not about the child, but about the spirit of the father who takes life with confidence. So autism was not a strategy, it just came up as a story and it came up to be a beautiful story as it had all the shades of what we had to say.

Digital way

Within hundred hours we had crossed a million views on YouTube. Currently, we have more than four million views, we were trending on twitter. Then we started TV one week later.

We have not created this campaign as a sales one. We have created this campaign to be an emotional one and till date we have got an overwhelming and humbling response. I have personally got a response from many senior people in the industry appreciating the campaign.

Innovations

We’ve always done in market innovations. For example, to stop people crossing railway lines, where there are cracks in the wall. We made those cracks into shapes of coffins. So every man walking from the crack in the wall feels that he is walking through a coffin and made him think twice. So that’s been a strategy. When the telegram was discontinued in India, we sent 5000 telegram’s to our customers, so the last telegram was sent by Birla Sun Life, that telegram is going to retire and I hope now you have a future.

Insurance over the decade

I’m not sure if consumer behaviour has changed and that we have done enough to drive that change. For the last decade, the trend remains the same of 40% business during the first quarter of the year, that wrong behaviour, wrong attitude and wrong understanding of the category has remained as it is and has not changed. So this whole campaign is an effort to change and reasons why people look at this category.

Way Forward

So if you ask me, Jan, Feb & March is a peak season, for advertisers to come up with a campaign. For us this is not another campaign but it is a philosophy for life for Birla SunLife Insurance thereafter. So we are going to stay with the strategy of what we have historically done. Our marketing ambition has always been to provoke mass India in self-realization. If we had known the importance, then penetration levels wouldn’t be so low. But we will continue with the strategy with the thought of “Honi ko kaun tal sakta hai, par honi bhi aapko nahi rok sakti, Khud Ko Kar Buland.” This is going to be our positioning, our philosophy for years ahead.

We may move on to fragmented approach to reach out to a more focussed target audience. But this strategy of ours will remain.

We have believed in our mission, which is to create self-realisation and that has not changed. So I don’t think we are going to change our strategy or outlook in the near future. We will see newer opportunities to capitalize on, to innovate, to create requisite noise for that message. By Archit Ambekar | Twitter: @aambarchit