MUMBAI: “Not today but surely tomorrow,” is something we all say even though tomorrow never comes. And if it does, it’s usually because someone or something triggers us into action.
Similarly, HDFC Life’s new campaign ‘Birthday’ to promote its long-term financial plan to secure the future of a child tries to inculcate among young parents the habit of disciplined and systematic investment planning by using their kid’s birthday as trigger.
HDFC Life didn’t want its campaign to be labelled as something that simply lures people but as an informative ‘trigger’ that would help them secure their child’s future.
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Drawing a parallel with the Cadbury ad which uses the tagline ‘Shubh Aarambh’ telling people to eat something sweet before starting something new, HDFC marketing, product, and direct channels senior executive vice president Sanjay Tripathy says: “Previously too, brands, especially FMCG brands, have used trigger-based communication successfully. Hence, we thought of using the same thought.”
“Birthday seemed the best option because as parents, one can plan a long-term and every b’day will act as a reminder for the payment of the premium. Timing and the context plays a very important part. We did this by showing in our film a younger kid and young parents and one of our contextual ads also shows age for buying the product, which is between 3-9 years so that parents can have a long investment horizon of 10-15 years for a bigger corpus available when the child turns 16, 18 or 21, ready to take up under or post graduation.”
Won’t the economic slowdown impact the plan and in such a scenario, will the trigger work?
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Child plans are some of our major plans and close to 15% of our business comes from this, says Sanjay Tripathy
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“Child plans are some of our major plans and close to 15% of our business comes from this. And when we did research, we found out that the parents are very involved in the planning of birthday celebrations, the other part that came out was that the mother is very involved in the planning of the financial future of the child. And lastly, people are not very clear about when to take the step? So we thought this a nice way to convey the message of when is the right time for the parent to start investing,” replies Tripathy.
The 360-degree campaign covers TV, print, radio, OOH and digital and will run for six weeks. Asked about the spend break-up, he says: “Television and print by nature are costly, and the amount I’m spending on digital might be less compared to them but it might be sufficient for that medium so I won’t be fair to break it down.”
With Leo Burnett having done the ATL (print, TV and radio), NCD KV Sridhar talks about campaign execution as: “Most of the times, the important parenting decisions are overshadowed by urgent ones. Through our campaign, we’ve tried to communicate to parents that investing in a child plan at the right time is equally important. And we thought what better day than a child’s birthday to remind parents to start investing for their future. After all, only when they invest on time will their children get the support they need to fulfil their dreams when they grow up”.
Digital agency Propaganda has handled the campaign’s digital side.
