Q] Can you shed some light on your brand journey and how it has strengthened over the years? Also, what innovative marketing strategies do you use to reach out to the masses?
Policybazaar’s positioning, starting with the Ullu campaign back in 2011, has been that of a brand that empowers consumers with information about various insurance plans from different insurance companies. This helps consumers make an informed decision and buy the insurance plans that suit their needs. This also helps them to save money. The same message was also reinforced with our campaign featuring Kapil Sharma back in 2015.
Policybazaar has led the category awareness agenda, highlighting the importance of term life insurance and health insurance for protecting the financial future of Indian families. This was evident in our ‘Yamraj’ campaign featuring Akshay Kumar in 2018, and ‘Ghor Paap’ campaign featuring Pankaj Tripathi in 2022. Also, over the years, consumer expectations from Policybazaar have transformed from an online insurance marketplace to an end-to-end insurance partner that not only helps them buy the best-suited products, but also helps them during claims. This was also seen in our ‘Mr. Policybazaar’ campaign featuring Akshay Kumar in 2022.
Apart from the various advertising campaigns, we also do content integrations for a deeper audience connection, which allows us to explain the brand message in a detailed manner without any duration restrictions. Some of the recent ones are the in-show integration of one of the most popular shows on Star Plus, Anupamaa; Trinayani on Zee Telugu, and OMG! Yeh Mera India on History TV18.
Q] Which medium do you aggressively target for your brand visibility and why? Can you elaborate on how you allocate your marketing budget on various platforms?
TV and Digital are the core advertising mediums for Policybazaar. TV fundamentally works on concurrency and helps us build a high amount of reach in a short period of time, while Digital mainly helps us reach out to incremental audiences that we won’t otherwise find on TV. Over the last few years, Connected TV has also become a regular feature in our media plans, and it helps us reach out to premium audiences, a large part of whom may also be cord-cutters.
Q] What trends are you observing related to the slowdown? What is the way ahead?
We’ve seen an encouraging consumer response for health and term life insurance. Our efforts to increase awareness for health and term life insurance will continue, alongside efforts to solidify the positioning of Policybazaar as an end-to-end insurance partner that also helps consumers at the time of claims.
Q] What is the marketing mix of your campaigns? Do you think, post-pandemic, the brand messaging and propositions in India have changed?
The pandemic was a period that helped consumers realise the importance of health insurance and term life insurance. While most consumers have always agreed on the importance of health and term insurance in the past as well, the pandemic helped overcome the inertia to create the required buying urgency. Even after the pandemic, there has certainly been a baseline shift in the realisation of the importance of the category.
Q] Do you still advertise on TV despite the slowdown? Can you share some insights on how you market your brand via TV?
TV continues to be the single largest reach medium in India. We mostly do a TV campaign every month of the year. Our TV spends follow the customers, and because most of them are working audiences, we tend to advertise during evening primetime on weekdays, and throughout the day on weekends, when these audiences are available in front of their TV sets.
Apart from news, movies, GECs, and various other genres, we also advertise regularly on cricket, which provides a large reach, and is also a more engaged genre, on account of being live, with very short breaks.
Q] How much of your marketing budget goes to TV and Digital? What is your advertising strategy for the General Elections in India?
TV and digital put together account for almost 100% of the marketing spends. The news genre witnesses the biggest spike during any election season, and it continues to be one of the most essential genres in our TV media plan.
Q] How much do you spend around elections?
The overall spends is not guided solely by the election-related media opportunities. The spending pattern could shift a little, with the news genre getting an increased share of spends.
Q] In what ways do big events such as the elections influence consumer behaviour?
Elections are a prominent media intervention, and they alter the media consumption behaviour of the audiences, resulting in the viewership of the news genre increasing significantly. With the IPL and the General Elections coinciding, it will be an extremely busy couple of months, and certainly benefit the news and the sports genre, albeit at the cost of the other genres.
