HDFC Life's campaign encourages mother to play an 'active role' in financial planning for the child

HDFC Life, one of India’s leading long-term private life insurance solutions providers today unveiled a new marketing campaign urging parents to make ‘birthday’ a perfect occasion for long-term financial planning for child’s secure future. The campaign drives the need for early planning, when the child is between 3 to 9 years so that 10-15 years of investment horizon is available for a bigger corpus when the child turns 16, 18 or 21, ready for under/post graduations.

Commenting on the new campaign, Sanjay Tripathy, Senior Executive Vice President - Marketing, Product, and Direct Channels said, “HDFC Life was one of the first brands to advertise and encourage buying child plans during school admissions and summer vacations to inculcate systematic and disciplined planning. We wanted to take this concept further and establish and own an occasion for buying a child plan similar to few other categories.   Child’s birthday emerged as a perfect occasion as parents with young children usually invest a lot of time and money planning, but may not be necessarily thinking about the child’s secure future during this early period. We wanted to use this occasion, which occurs year-on-year to speak to both parents and encourage them to opt for long term financial plan for their child’s future. Our internal research also reiterated that for parents ‘birthdays’ are relevant to their lives and buying the product on their child’s ‘birthday’ will remind them to pay premium every year.”

“Secondly, changing trend in the society reflects that Indian parents have evolved and invest in the development of child together. However, the category continues to talk to fathers, overlooking the important role of a mother’s influencing power. Our research showed that financial planning for the child was top priority for mothers when it comes to life insurance. We wanted to tap into the potential of appealing to mothers, either for them to buy the product or to influence the father to do it. In either case, we found from our research that while consumers (fathers) knew they had to buy a child plan, they procrastinate as there are a lot of other rearing priorities when they are new parents. This is where the mother’s nurturing and influencing power comes into play - to ensure that the step is taken at the right time. We have captured this well in our film showing the mother, instead of the father, outlining that they have both planned for short and long term needs,” he added.

“Thirdly, our research showed that most parents do not buy child plan at the right time. We needed our communication to cue in financial planning at the right time. We did this by showing in our film a younger kid and young parents and one of our contextual ads also shows age for buying the product, which is between 3-9 years so that parents can have long investment horizon of 10-15 years for bigger corpus available when the child turns 16, 18 or 21, ready to take up under or post graduations, Tripathy concluded.

KV Sridhar, National Creative Director, Leo Burnett, said,” “Most of the times, the important parenting decisions are overshadowed by urgent ones. Through our campaign, we’ve tried to communicate to parents that investing in a child plan at the right time is equally important. And we thought what better day than a child’s birthday to remind parents to start investing for their future. After all, only when they invest on time will their children get the support they need to fulfill their dreams when they grow up”.