How station branding has been helping Bank of Baroda increase brand value

Bank of Baroda is India’s leading public sector bank with a strong domestic presence, supported by self-service channels. The Bank’s distribution network now includes 8,200+ branches, 10,000+ ATMs, and 18,000 Business Correspondents. The Bank has a significant international presence with a network of 100 branches/ offices of subsidiaries, spanning 20 countries.

This festive season, Bank of Baroda strived to leverage the opportunity and speak to their customers through their new campaign for retail loans. The objective of the ad campaign was to create brand awareness among the prospective customers, integrated with the product offerings. The campaign was aimed at reaching the audience to convey that as a bank, they were always by the customers’ side and would enable them in realising their dreams with the help of their products and attractive offers. To mark and support this initiative, the bank ran a 360-degree campaign under the theme – ‘Hum Karein Mumkin’. While it was a 360-degree campaign, the emphasis and focus were towards leveraging outdoor medium and talking about their various offerings in retail loans.

In conversation with Adgully, Purshotam, Chief General Manager – Retail Liabilities, WMS, Marketing, Demat & NRI Business, Bank of Baroda, speaks at length about their campaign for retail loans and how the Bank has been strategically leveraging the outdoor medium.

Your latest campaign – ‘Hum Karein Mumkin’ – for retail loans is visible all over. What’s been the objective of this campaign? Who is your target audience? Please tell us about the thought process for this campaign?

The objective: Festivals in India are a time to celebrate joyously with family, friends and neighbours and where everyone dreams of a happy life together. The ad campaign was based on creating brand awareness among the prospective customers integrated with product offerings. The campaign aims to reach the audience to convey that as a bank, we are always by their side and will enable them in realising their dreams with the help of our products and attractive offers, hence the theme ‘Hum Karein Mumkin - Retail Loan Campaign’.

The target audience: All Adults, 13+ of age group audiences pan India.

Thought process for the campaign: Festivities and time-honoured traditions are the heart of Indian culture. The festive season contributes a large chunk to advertising expenditure every year. Starting with Ganesh Chaturthi and Onam, the season peaks during Diwali and continues till Christmas, as per the markets trends, accounting for approximately 40% of overall advertising expenditure every year.

During the festive season, brands jostle for a share of the consumers’ wallet as they see festivals as an important opportunity to attract buyers through occasion-based advertising. However, for any brand to create a clutter-breaking festive campaign, it’s important to find the underlying connect between the festival and what the brand stands for.

Accordingly, we had planned a 360-degree campaign, including TV and Radio Mediums for an effective advertising campaign with a focus on retail loans. At Bank of Baroda, we have always had deep roots in Indian culture, wanting to be part of our customer’s joy and amplifying their achievements. We want to be more than a Bank to them, more like family in these testing times of the pandemic, where the focus has been brought back to the importance of family in one’s life.

How attractive are your retail loans? How are you different from the other PSU banks in your offerings? What are the compelling reasons for someone to apply for the retail loans?

Our Home loan rates start at 6.85%, Car loan at 7.10%, Mortgage loan at 8.05% and Education loans at 6.85%, making our pricing very compelling for borrowers to consider. We are also offering concession on processing charge on car and home loans. We are offering online digital sanction for car, home and personal loan. Our criteria for rate offering is unique as compared to other banks, PSU and Private, as we do not differentiate between loan amounts, salaried or self-employed , women or men borrower and only criteria for pricing is the risk score of the customer on CIBIL.

We also have transparency in pricing matrix, repo benchmarked rate, no income based home loan takeover, two days disbursal in car loans, unsecured loans and special offer for premier institutes.

A lot of emphasis has been put to the OOH medium by branding some of the stations in Mumbai. What was the media strategy adopted here?

After relaxation in the lockdown, the Government started the railways for essential services from May 2020 and from October 21 onwards it has started for ladies from 11 am to 7 pm, which adds to the passenger traffic at the stations.

Railway stations are one of the prominent locations to get a good number of footfall and visibility. Moreover, the Bank needs to emphasis on retail products such as Home Loan/ Car Loan during the festive season.

Further, Dadar, as we all know, is one of the busiest stations as it is the major interchange railway station of Mumbai Suburban Railway. It has a huge footfall when compared to the other stations. Bank of Baroda had taken a strategic call to reinforce our brand along with product promotion during the festive season as most of the travellers are influencers who help in generating the business.

Movement of traffic is just trickling and travelling by trains is still not open so how do you justify that the visibility in the stations will grab the attention? How do you plan to check the effectiveness of the campaign as measuring the outdoor media is always a challenge?

People from essential services sector have been allowed to travel and further, as has been the norm, we had conducted the recce of the station before hiring the media and it was found that good number of people are travelling by train.

Many times it happens that if the traffic at the station is more, there are high chances to miss the ad, hence the present footfall at the station allows the commuter to notice the advertisements and helps in better recall.

It is challenging to measure the effectiveness of the media in case of outdoor, therefore monthly inspection of the media is done to understand the effectiveness of the ad and the location.

Keeping in view the long run strategy to increase brand value, we have adopted to go for station branding, that is, train wrapping of Mumbai Metro and Dadar Railway station.

What kind of response did the retail loans campaign get? How did you execute the disbursal of retail loans as people don’t frequent branches much? Have people moved to digital payments and net banking in recent months?

We saw huge jump in enquiries – around 70% for car loans and 27% for home loans between October 2020 and November 2020. Majority of the retail loans needs execution of loan documents and hence, one visit to the branch was required.

PV Sindhu has been the brand ambassador of Bank of Baroda for quite a while. What prompted the bank to engage her to endorse the brand and what was the criteria for identifying her to engage with your audience?

Celebrity associations are a fruitful way of enhancing brand salience and the Bank has always strived to meaningfully integrate with marquee celebrities. With an objective to increase our brand value in a gradual manner, it was decided to engage PV Sindhu and K Srikanth as brand endorsers.

Bank of Baroda had entered into an agreement with these ace badminton players in October 2016, wherein the players would serve as brand endorsers for a period of 3 years. The partnership was entered when they were budding players and the Bank believed in their potential, and over the years, they have become iconic personalities in the field of sports.

The associations have helped the Bank to strengthen its foothold in the field of sports and it has been well used to connect with Gen Y customers because of the association with youth sporting icons of the country.

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