 "BankBazaar.com: The value of money")
For marketers and brands, it's not uncommon to woo consumers with emotional and nostalgic advertising campaigns. Chocolate brand Cadbury (now a Mondelez brand) is a classic example of a brand striking an emotional connect with consumers by riding on the relationship bandwagon. With its latest digital campaign, "#Thank You Dad", online financial marketplace BankBazaar.com hopes to emulate Cadbury's success by focusing on the father-son relationship.
The campaign is an ode to all the fathers who are the first sounding boards in a person's financial decision-making. The message running through the digital film is that it's a father who instils the habit of savings and financial planning early on in a child through his prudent counsel and conduct.
The film opens with a man remembering a time when his family was not well off and struggled to make ends meet. Surprised, his son says that as a kid he led a comfortable life and never realised that the family was going through hardships. The father responds that his wife's resourcefulness and his own financial planning saw the family through the hard times. He then nostalgically recalls the importance of saving hard-earned money and indulgently asks his son what he bought with his first pocket money. Fishing out an old one-rupee coin from his wallet, the son proudly tells him that he has saved it till date. Next we see the visibly emotional and proud father asking his son to give him a peek into the new car he has bought with his own earnings. The film comes to an end with a voice-over that says, "Here's to the father who taught you the first thing about money. We too have your best financial interest in mind."
Traditionally, campaigns in the financial services space have brands focussing on a new product or service offering. Interestingly, BankBazaar.com's campaign steers clear of this path and forges a narrative on the value of money and importance of saving without giving any product details.
Though free of category cliches, with its father-son dialogue the video appears preachy in parts. This could possibly end up alienating BankBazaar's target audience comprising young salaried class - a segment known to be averse to anything preachy.
Shetty plays down such fears and insists that the conversation in the ad is far from boring. "It's a mature and friendly dialogue and this is how most of my target audience have conversations with their parents," he says.
The campaign has been conceived by ad veteran Manoj Shetty, ex-Ogilvy group creative head. "Our focus was to narrate an emotional story educating customers as to why the brand is in the business and what is it doing to further simplify and enrich their lives," he says.
The key objective was to strike a chord with onliners in the age-group of 25-40. While brainstorming for ideas, the ad team discovered that if one were to rewind, one realised that this generation emerged around the time when the iron curtain on India's socialist economy was being lifted. This was a time when families were still closely knit and disposable money was hard to come by, and fathers were the only gatekeepers of the money. "For this generation most conversations with a father in early adulthood were about getting something from him, from monthly pocket money to their first bike. The film too brings alive some of these long forgotten memories and conversations putting the focus on father-son camaraderie," explains Manoj Shetty.
BankBazaar.com is offering services such as personal loan, credit cards and insurance. The aim is to provide consumers a complete range of personal finance services. The company recently added mutual funds to its platform.
Even as BankBazaar.com aims to dominate the marketplace by instantly issuing financial products, challenges remain. It faces the uphill task of changing consumers' age-old habit of purchasing personal finance offline and going paperless. "We are tackling this by assuring users that we have the best technology offering a secure transaction environment," says Adhil Shetty.
The campaign is an ode to all the fathers who are the first sounding boards in a person's financial decision-making. The message running through the digital film is that it's a father who instils the habit of savings and financial planning early on in a child through his prudent counsel and conduct.
The film opens with a man remembering a time when his family was not well off and struggled to make ends meet. Surprised, his son says that as a kid he led a comfortable life and never realised that the family was going through hardships. The father responds that his wife's resourcefulness and his own financial planning saw the family through the hard times. He then nostalgically recalls the importance of saving hard-earned money and indulgently asks his son what he bought with his first pocket money. Fishing out an old one-rupee coin from his wallet, the son proudly tells him that he has saved it till date. Next we see the visibly emotional and proud father asking his son to give him a peek into the new car he has bought with his own earnings. The film comes to an end with a voice-over that says, "Here's to the father who taught you the first thing about money. We too have your best financial interest in mind."
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"The campaign reflects our brand's value proposition. We are simply saying that as a father is the first person to give you right advice about money, we also have your best financial interest in mind," says Adhil Shetty, co-founder and chief executive officer, Bankbazaar.com.
Traditionally, campaigns in the financial services space have brands focussing on a new product or service offering. Interestingly, BankBazaar.com's campaign steers clear of this path and forges a narrative on the value of money and importance of saving without giving any product details.
Though free of category cliches, with its father-son dialogue the video appears preachy in parts. This could possibly end up alienating BankBazaar's target audience comprising young salaried class - a segment known to be averse to anything preachy.
Shetty plays down such fears and insists that the conversation in the ad is far from boring. "It's a mature and friendly dialogue and this is how most of my target audience have conversations with their parents," he says.
The campaign has been conceived by ad veteran Manoj Shetty, ex-Ogilvy group creative head. "Our focus was to narrate an emotional story educating customers as to why the brand is in the business and what is it doing to further simplify and enrich their lives," he says.
The key objective was to strike a chord with onliners in the age-group of 25-40. While brainstorming for ideas, the ad team discovered that if one were to rewind, one realised that this generation emerged around the time when the iron curtain on India's socialist economy was being lifted. This was a time when families were still closely knit and disposable money was hard to come by, and fathers were the only gatekeepers of the money. "For this generation most conversations with a father in early adulthood were about getting something from him, from monthly pocket money to their first bike. The film too brings alive some of these long forgotten memories and conversations putting the focus on father-son camaraderie," explains Manoj Shetty.
BankBazaar.com is offering services such as personal loan, credit cards and insurance. The aim is to provide consumers a complete range of personal finance services. The company recently added mutual funds to its platform.
Even as BankBazaar.com aims to dominate the marketplace by instantly issuing financial products, challenges remain. It faces the uphill task of changing consumers' age-old habit of purchasing personal finance offline and going paperless. "We are tackling this by assuring users that we have the best technology offering a secure transaction environment," says Adhil Shetty.