 "HDFC Bank rolls out its largest ever brand campaign")
HDFC Bank, India’s second largest private sector lender, has decided to roll out an aggressive brand campaign to cement its position as a digital bank.
According to Parag Rao, head (cards, merchant acquiring business and marketing) HDFC Bank, this is the “largest ever brand campaign undertaken by the bank”. He said this is in line with the bank’s philosophy of transforming itself into a digital bank.
“We started this journey of transforming ourselves into a digital bank a year ago with our digital campaign, ‘Bank aapki mutthi main’. Our objective has been to offer everything on the digital medium and with this in mind, we launched several products such as 10-second loans, payzapp, etc on the digital platform.”
The bank decided to become a “digital bank” after its managing director Aditya Puri’s visit to the Silicon Valley. Several investors cautioned him that banking was going to become ‘obsolete’ and banks were going to be a ‘dinosaur’, as technology players were looking at ways to oust lenders.
Rao said now that the lender has been successful in the transformation process, they have decided to flag off this advertising campaign, which will be launched shortly and will run over a course of two-three months. “We will be communicating via all the seven channels to the customers — print, television, radio, digital, outdoor media, amplified internal communications, automated teller machines (ATMs) and bank branches. The lender has 4,101 branches and 11,962 ATMs.
Even though Rao declined to share the budget for this campaign, sources say the bank has set aside Rs 35 crore for this purpose. The lender has not appointed any brand ambassador for these campaigns.
With these campaigns, the bank is also looking at targeting and acquiring new customers.
To push its digital focus, the bank took a slew of initiatives this year. These include a mobile application that allows a customer to meet his or her shopping and payment requirements; personal loan in 10 seconds; and auto loans within 30 minutes using the biometric authentication. Now the bank is set to launch top-up loans on the existing auto loans in nano-seconds as well.
The digital strategy has already begun to pay off and the bank has seen robust growth on this channel. In FY15, 63 per cent of the total transactions were carried out on the internet and mobile compared with 55 per cent in FY14 and 44 per cent in FY13.
