Conventional wisdom suggests that life insurance is always sold and not bought in India. There is no customer who will walk into a store and pick up a life insurance box off the shelf. Insurers have to go to homes and sell it. Max New York Life feels it can reverse the trend. It has come out with a product called Max Vijay which can be topped up with as little as Rs 10.
Mass media may not have worked in this case. Instead, Max New York Life has placed the boxes in about 100 grocery stores in the city of Agra. People who come to pick up ration and other staples can also buy insurance off the shelf, often with the change they are handed back. It has supported this with some social work — scholarships for poor students, restoration of some old buildings etc. It even flew Amitabh Bachchan down to talk about the virtues of life insurance in general and Max Vijay in particular. Some 30,000 people turned up to listen to the superstar. The company will work this experiment for three to six months. If successful, this model will be rolled out elsewhere.
The life insurance market is crowded. Most insurers have their eyes on large cities and towns which are easy to tap. Max New York Life had decided that it would seek its fortune in small towns and rural India — underinsured but moneyed. The barrier it encountered was the huge brand equity of state-owned Life Insurance Corporation, which got reinforced by the financial meltdown. People thought their money would be safe only with Life Insurance Corporation. The Agra experiment is an attempt by Max New York Life to crack open the market.
Marketers like Max New York Life have begun to look at ground-level activation with new respect. While advertising campaigns create brand awareness, they have realised that what matters is brand experience. This is where activation steps in. Not as a rival to mass- media advertising, but to support it. Industry experts reckon it could be as much as 40 per cent of the total annual advertising expenditure of Rs 15,000 crore in the country. Five years ago, it was not more than 25 per cent of a much smaller pie. Till a year ago, Max New York Life would spend around 20 per cent of its marketing budget (net of sales promotion) on activation and other below-the-line promotion. Now, it is as high as 25 to 30 per cent. Ambika Sharma of Jagran Solutions, an activation specialist, says that companies in the last one year have moved budgets sharply from events to activation. Clearly, they find the return on investment in activation higher.
What is driving the trend is clearly the increased competition across categories — telecom, insurance, fast-moving consumer goods, automobile, the media, lifestyle etc. As a result, most companies now have in place full-fledged activation teams. Their task is to plan on-ground activity right through the year. There could be regions within the country where the brand is not moving. This can be solved with activation and not mass media. There are about a dozen agencies in the country which now offer activation services. Business for most has grown at a fast clip — in excess of 20 to 25 per cent per annum. Almost all telecom service providers have activation teams in each circle. Telecom services have got fully commoditised. Work done at the ground now plays a huge role in getting customers.
For lifestyle companies, mass media means a lot of wastage. The message goes across to multiple socio-economic categories and age groups. All of them might not be their customers. Activation helps them talk to a closed group where the bulk of their customers reside.
Microsoft, for example, went to colleges when it had to launch Windows Live mail. The idea was to approach a group of potential customers together who were not hooked to an organisation’s domain name and were willing to try out a new mail. It thus chose the college-going student community. It held a competition for students to design websites for their college and hand out e-mail addresses. It approached close to 9,500 colleges in 71 cities, of which 254 participated. The bottom line is that Microsoft was able to generate almost 350,000 addresses. More important, it cut down drastically the customer acquisition cost.
For fast-moving consumer goods companies, the problem has always been the unwillingness of customers to sample a new product. This is a bigger problem when the consumer happens to be a woman. A woman, experience tells us, is an extremely loyal customer. It takes a great deal to make a woman alter her brand preferences. This is a problem, for instance, all hair care companies face in the country.
Dabur, for three years now, has held rural beauty pageants under its hair oil brand Dabur Amla. The brand is endorsed by Rani Mukherjee — an actor with appeal in rural and semi-urban markets as well. The pageant reinforces the connection of the brand with a glamorous lifestyle. In the last three years, the brand has grown at double the pace of the three years before the pageant was launched. A similar initiative for its glucose with cricketer Zaheer Khan has seen sale growth jump from 20 per cent to 50 per cent in the last one year.
The company now wants to do something similar with Dabur Chyawanprash. It plans to carry out immunity assessments in over a million schools — the product is all about building immunity to disease. Once the properties of Dabur Chyawanprash are conveyed to the children, the message, the company feels, is bound to travel to the parent. This could result in better sale. Dabur reckons it will be good for the brand.
Activation also helps reach out to customers who do not access the mass media. Castrol recently came up with grease called Castrol Formula Gel. The target consumers were truck mechanics spread across the country. Research showed that most of them are uneducated and do not read newspapers. Exposure to the electronic media is limited to news between 9 pm and 11 pm. Castrol’s mass media campaign would have had zero impact. So, it crafted a campaign for the transport hubs in major cities where these mechanics have their workshops. Posters were put up which said ball bearings under attack, situation critical, who’s to blame? The next day teams dressed as news crew showed up with Castrol Formula Gel. Almost 2,500 mechanics and 400 dealers got to see and feel the brand. There is no way the company could have reached out to these people through mass media.
