Visa recently signed up Olympic gold medallist and World No. 1 men’s javelin thrower Neeraj Chopra as a brand ambassador ahead of the Paris Olympics. Chopra’s collaboration with Visa makes him the second athlete from India after badminton superstar PV Sindhu to tie up with the card company.
Storyboard18 caught up with Sujatha V Kumar, head of marketing, Visa India and South Asia, to talk about the association with Chopra and the company’s plans for the 2024 Paris Olympics.
What are your expectations from the association with Neeraj Chopra ahead of the Paris Olympics?
Visa has been associated with the Olympics since 1986. The Olympics sees a huge viewership globally. In India, we have seen interest in the Olympics grow in the past few years with larger contingents going in and of course more medals coming into India.
Our association in India started in 2019 when we signed PV Sindhu as our team Visa athlete. Sindhu needs no introduction. She’s a two-time Olympic medallist. We have all heard stories about her inspirational growth, how, as a young child, she would have to be up at 3 am and travel three-and-a-half hours every morning to train, and we know where she’s reached today. This year, we have the Olympics again in Paris in July and August, and we’re very happy to announce that we’re adding to our team Visa family in India. We’ve signed Olympic gold medallist Neeraj Chopra as the new team Visa athlete for India.
We have a lot of excitement planned. The good thing about the Olympics this year is it’s very different from the last time. If you remember Tokyo 2020, which actually happened in 2021 due to the pandemic, it was an Olympics where there were no spectators.
So, it was a very different, very quiet Olympics. But this time round, it’s happening in the busy, bustling city of Paris, and there’s going to be a huge audience cheering on the fans. So, what we are planning to do is actually start acting on it very soon. The last time around, because we could not have any spectators, what we wanted to do was let PV Sindhu know that there were Indians cheering her on, and we wanted the Indian fans to get the feel of partaking in the Olympics.
So we launched a campaign called ‘A Million Cheers’, where we asked people to send cheers for her before she left. We started this ten days before the Olympics and the hope was to reach a million. You won’t believe it, but we reached more than 8 million in ten days, which shows the goodwill that Olympic stars have with Indians.
This year we are looking at going a step further. We will be doing a campaign and activation around both athletes, highlighting the small steps they have taken to reach the levels they are at today. We are also looking at the possibility of sending some consumers to go and watch the games live, in Paris. And for those who can’t go, we are looking at organising what we call viewing parties, across cities. We take up a venue and we show key live events. Definitely Sindhu and Neeraj, and maybe some other key events involving India, so people can cheer them on from here itself.
Almost everybody has moved to digital payments, in some form or other. But this has also resulted in a lot of frauds. As one of the largest players in this space, what are some of the steps Visa has taken to raise awareness among consumers about this?
Digital payments have seen huge growth and that is for two reasons: it is seen as fast and convenient. However, with fast and convenient, as you have seen, there have been many scams and frauds. Visa plays a strong role in ensuring security of payments. In every transaction you do on Visa, within two seconds there are 500 layers of security that go into it. If you have online payment we have something called tokenisation, so that your card details, name, card number, none of it goes to the merchant. Apart from that, features like zero liability, immediate card replacement, all are features that make us a very strong player in the security factor.
Given the scams and frauds, we actually started a campaign last year called ‘Pay Safe With Visa’, where we onboarded celebrity brand ambassador Vicky Kaushal to talk to people about the issue. He took on the role of a Visa protagonist to explain to people how when you pay with Visa on your mobile or online, in everyday transactions, the transactions are absolutely safe because of the security.
In the competitive digital payments market, how do you retain your customer today?
So, we are both a B2B and a B2C company. We work with our clients to ensure that consumers get the best offers on cards, that they are aware of what all they can do with their card at merchants, that they can pay very safely and securely with Visa.
With consumers, what we’ve seen is that with the advent of social and digital media, you can actually communicate with your consumers almost one on one. And what we’re able to do is we’re able to therefore personalise the message. I’ll give you an example; if you’re travelling to London next week and I’m travelling to Dubai, say in three months, our needs are very different. You probably would already have your travel fully booked. And what you’re looking at is what are the things to see, where to eat, what to shop? I will serve you a very different set of creatives and information to answer that. Whereas, for someone like me, who is going in three months, I will need more information on how to go, where to stay. We’re able to use social and digital media to serve the right messages to the right people. And that has seen a lot of adoption among consumers.
Read More: Travel international without visa? top visa-free countries for Indians