In a category where fear and risk is the driving force, Max Life Insurance has identified sports to be its driving force when it comes to connecting with consumers. The firm has switched from sponsorship and leveraging players as sports icon to leveraging personal family image of its endorser Rohit Sharma and wife Ritika Sajdeh. This is the company’s second ad campaign of the year that evangelizes the importance of guaranteed savings plans that help with long-term financial stability by building a corpus, create a stable source of income, and secure the future of the family.
The TV spots seems to have resonated with the netizens garnering over two million cumulative views on brand’s official YouTube channel. Rahul Talwar, chief marketing officer, Max Life Insurance, says, “As a category, the performance orientation and the realness of sports is what attracted our work towards sports. Some of the recent work we have done is actually also underpinning on them (Rohit and Ritika) being a real life couple as a young family imagery versus only using Rohit as a sports icon. That’s why if you look at a lot of creative work that we have rolled out in the last four to six weeks is more about them being a more young family which is highly relatable.”
Creating financial awareness
This is particularly critical in a category where fear tends to be the go-to strategy for communication. But things are changing. Max Life Insurance majority TG are millennials who wish to make informed insurance choices. They are looking for awareness heavy content and flexibility in insurance products. Cricket players like Sharma therefore make for a reliable choice. The company is also consciously creating communication which does not alienate women in the decision making of buying insurance as more women millennials come in working fore.
“…over the last two to three years, we’ve been in this journey to be able to celebrate the individual or the breadwinner, and I’m very conscious of saying the individual or the breadwinner, because we are also trying to be a brand which not only focuses on the male consumers but would also start including females in this decision making process of buying insurance. Self-awareness, self-realisation and seal action are also key areas where our work goes into,” adds Talwar.
Though Sharma remains the headliner for Max Life Insurance, the company also actively works with a bunch of influencers and finfluencers to reach out to niche cohorts of customers.
“…our specific work that we may be doing, say for our homemaker audience, or for a particular kind of cohort that you’re trying to address to, the we would be then going to the world of influencers. We believe that we have the expertise to leverage the space of influencers, and to be able to ensure that we’re seeding the right education around Max life insurance,” Talwar notes.
Targetting millennials
Max Life Insurance is also actively working on its direct to consumer business where it gets inundated with lots of queries from millennial customers who are looking for more flexible plans. The brand has created platforms on the protection space or term insurance space under a platform called India protection quotient where resources are provided for customers to make more informed choice about the plans and insurance in general.
“There are certain features that allow you to do that, to be able to enable that flexibility, because Millennials today have a big ambition of doing it yourself, and will be able to have those flexible options in front of them,” shares Talwar.
Leveraging both mainstream (including regional media) and digital platforms (connected TV, social media, OTT), Max Life Insurance plans to build a reliable repository of resources for customers.
“The idea is to be able to clear out the larger narrative of life insurance and to be able to create literacy around it. And we do a lot of work with celebrities, influencers in that space along with media houses. We will continue to build on that,” he concludes.