Are you also suffering from KILB disease ?

Sumedha Srivastav - Televisionpoint.com | Mumbai
This is the question that the new insurance kid on the block Aegon Religare, has asked the Indians in its campaign to create a buzz around the company in August last year. Since 2001, there has been a constant flurry of insurance players who have entered the segment and are talking left, right and centre about their offerings, making it quite a cluttered category.

Religare, the financial arm of Ranbaxy, had joined hands with the Dutch financial group Aegon in July 2008 to form a 50:50 joint venture to become 'yet another' private company to offer its insurance services in the country. The company has now introduced its next product offering – pension plans.

The data revealed by AdEx shows that TV advertising alone by the insurance sector has increased by a whopping 54 per cent during the quarter ending December 2008. The mantra adopted by the marketing honchos of these insurance companies is simple – to lure consumers to buy their insurance products with either negative or positive reinforcements.

Aegon Religare, however, decided to chart a brand new track that would help the company to generate curiosity around their product. In January, Aegon Religare launched a teaser campaign using radio, TV and outdoor campaigns questioning people, 'Kya aapko KILB hai?' (Do you have KILB?).

Pradeep Pandey

Pradeep Pandey, director, branding and communications, Aegon Religare Life Insurance, says, "We wanted to develop a campaign that would be relevant to the people, as most people in India are not even aware that there is a way to calculate how much insurance one should have."

The KILB abbreviation grabbed instant eyeballs with everyone discussing what it actually stood for. KILB being an instant success can be gauged from the fact that the week after the launch of the campaign, KILB was the seventh most searched word by Indians on the search engine Google.

The teaser campaign was followed by ads featuring actor Irrfan Khan who warned people against the disease called KILB, which stands for 'Kum Insurance Lene Ki Bimari.' The basic premise behind KILB was to warn people against under insurance.

According to the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (IRDA) only 4 per cent of the Indian population is insured. What's more? Majority of those who have taken some kind of insurance cover are still not adequately covered and realise this only when they are confronted by the untimely death of the earning member of the family.

Moreover, the amount that the beneficiary receives may not be adequate to let the family sail through for even one year, leave alone for the rest of their lives. It is with this insight that Aegon Religare has developed the KILB campaign in a bid to launch its life insurance product in India.

And what really got the ad noticed was the addition of the word 'disease' that made people sit up and take notice. "We included the word disease with KILB because we wanted people to be pro-active as it is an insurance product that we intended to sell," informs Raghu Bhat, vice-president and executive creative director, Contract Advertising.

The entire campaign was stretched across six weeks and was targeted at people in the age range of 25-50 years belonging to the SEC A and B category. The company shelled out a neat Rs 7-8 crore to ensure that their message is well received.

"Normally one would expect about 8,000 to 10,000 queries to be generated by such an exercise and that is what we too expected but we were pleasantly surprised to have received around 55,000 inquiry calls," adds Bhat. At that time Aegon Religare was not even prepared to handle the entire load and had to upscale their operations to handle the flow of calls.

After the initial assault, Aegon Religare is now back in action to lure consumers with a brand new pension plan. This campaign is very much in sync with their earlier communication and talks about how one does not factor in inflation, cost of living, et al, while purchasing a pension or retirement plan, which is exactly what this ad informs the consumers about.

The first pension TVC, which features Irrfan Khan, who is dressed up as an old man, opens in a supermarket. Khan looks at a carton of milk and asks the salesperson its price. Much to his chagrin, the salesperson replies, "180 rupees." During the course of the day, Khan is shocked to discover what a litre of petrol will now cost him, or even how unbelievably unaffordable a bus ticket is.

As fellow passengers in the bus raise a hue and cry about the rise in prices of essential commodities, Khan gets into the picture, pulling off his fake beard and moustache. He tells the gathered people that things will soon be this expensive – if not now, then 20 years later. He reminds them that in 20 years, after retirement, there won't be any income and prices will keep increasing.

Khan advises the crowd that in order to save, they need to learn what their exact pension amount should be, and this is where Aegon Religare can help them. The ad ends with information about Aegon Religare's toll-free number, which consumers can use to get their queries answered.

A national research study was conducted by the insurance company, which brought to light certain facts. The study revealed that unlike life insurance, which is taken for one's entire family, individuals do not invest in pension plans easily. Hence, the company took the step in educating the consumer about the right pension amount.

However, as opposed to life insurance, pension is more difficult a thing to sell as life insurance is for your loved ones while one picks up pension plans for oneself only. And most of the time you would be making a trade off rather than taking both the plans.

But post the Mumbai attacks, pension has suddenly become a very hot category amongst the insurance players as the threat of uncertainly striking is more real now. Coupled with the slow down finally being a reality and numerous job losses, Indian consumers are taking about pension plans a littler more seriously.

The brand would also continue to deliver its message in a direct and straightforward way as it has in the past. More importantly, Aegon Religare feels that if it comes across any knowledge gap, then it would look at addressing that, in order to not just grow its own share but also help the industry to grow many folds in the bargain.

Also, excited by the digital success of the KILB campaign, by mid-February, the company launched a new product focused and direct-to-customer retail distribution channel, for which it hired id8Labs. The spends by Aegon Religare for digital marketing for the customer initiative to drive customer acquisition will only be online driven.

"Our strong understanding of the financial domain helped us bag the account. Direct to customer will be the mantra increasingly followed by companies across domains." says Amit Tripathi, chairman and managing director, id8Labs.