Financing is a very important aspect of Maruti’s business: Shashank Srivastava

Maruti Suzuki recently launched the Smart Finance option for customers pan-India, who are willing to buy the new cars from the manufacturer. On Friday, March 4, 2022, Maruti launched an integrated campaign – ‘Finance from Anywhere’ – to amplify the category-first offerings of the Smart Finance platform. Through this campaign, Maruti Suzuki aims to spread awareness about how the Smart Finance platform has redefined the modern car buying experience. The multimedia campaign will be launched across TV and digital platforms. The campaign aims at building awareness for the innovative offering from MSIL while highlighting the convenience associated with Maruti Suzuki Smart Finance in an interesting manner. All the campaign collaterals will be amplifying the transformative benefit of being able to conveniently finance your Maruti Suzuki vehicles from anywhere.

Adgully spoke to Shashank Srivastava, Senior Executive Director (Marketing & Sales), Maruti Suzuki India Limited, to know more about the Smart finance offering, the thought behind the ‘Finance from Anywhere’ campaign, their target audience, expectations and much more.

What was the thought behind the “Finance from Anywhere” campaign?

What we had observed was that the consumer choices regarding the car buying process has become more digitalised – out of the 26 touchpoints that the consumer has while buying a car, 21 of them are digitalised. The five points which are not, include test driving the car under consideration and three points related to consumer finance.

Financing is a very important aspect of our business. 80% of the retail in auto is through financing and finance has been one of the pain points for the consumer – first, it was not digitalised, but with the Covid pandemic, people have moved towards more digitalisation. Second, while 80% of the cars are financed, it is not really a very satisfying process for the consumer because of lack of information, so the consumer has to visit the bank or at least interact with the bank representatives many times. Besides, there is a lack of transparency in terms of pricing, it is not so easy to understand those hidden charges, file charges, interest rates for different types of consumer financing products, and moreover, the complete comparison with all financial products is not available.

In other words, consumers were always wondering whether they got the best financing deal or not. So, for these reasons we decided to launch this platform called the Maruti Suzuki Smart Finance (MSSF). We started out in 2020 with three banks and we did a pilot in Gurgaon, we expanded it in September 2020 to 8 financiers and 10 cities, By October we had expanded to 30 cities, and in December we increased the number of financiers to 10. In April 2021, we launched pan-India for both Arena and Nexa consumers. So far, we have dispersed about Rs 15,000 crore worth of loans to over 2.6 lakh customers. Consumers have appreciated this initiative and in order to spread further awareness about this very successful programme, we came up with the campaign – ‘Finance From Anywhere’. The campaign proposition is that it is very easy and convenient to get financing for cars and that customers can do it from anywhere in the world. This high decibel campaign is planned for both television and digital.

What is the consumer group that you are targeting through this campaign? How do you plan to engage with your audience with this campaign?

The demographic is now all over India, so wherever our consumers are – whether it is urban areas, rural areas, young or old – this is available to any car buyer. If you ask what is the demographic of the car buyer, of course, it ranges from a 20-year old to 54-55 years of age, but if you are looking at the communication TG, it’s a different thing. For us, the communication TG and the target TG are two different things, the communication TG is a lot younger – 24-36 years, SSE AMD.

What is your media strategy to reach your audience in all your markets?

As I said earlier, we have a high decibel campaign across television and digital. In Television, we will also be taking in the genres which are high affinity for our TG. These high affinity genres are News, Entertainment and Auto, so these are the three main genres that we are covering. This is in line with the TG affinity, of course, and we are also planning impact properties, especially in News and Entertainment genres.

From a technology perspective, what are the new developments in the automobile sector?

From an industry perspective, there are huge technological advances. People are talking about CASE, which is Connected, Autonomous, Shared and Electric. So, technologies are in different stages of development in each of these four and when you talk of financing the platform, it is something which is driven by AI, it is online end-to-end finance and you can look at auto approvals for certain types of consumers. So, both in terms of the offerings of the finance product as well as the product technology separately; then it is all those technologies that I referred to.

What is the kind of traction that you are expecting from this campaign?

With Maruti Suzuki Smart Finance, we are doing it for the first time. We are targeting something like a 500 GRP, with 40% 3+ reach and 50% 1+ reach and EOT as 9.