The life insurance sector is one of the very few that can (and has) successfully and fearless use fear to advertise its wares. In almost every other sector, using fear may evoke the opposite intended reaction from potential buyers, but in the life insurance segment, that is precisely what actually sells products.
Indian life insurance brands have used every possible story angle that there is, to sell life insurance.
Here’s a quick recap.
Probably the most famous life insurance ad, by LIC. The ad sells the fear of, “What if this were to happen to my family/wife?” pretty directly. It’s a different point that in current times, we would be wondering what the wife’s qualifications are and why she wouldn’t be working, to help her family. But this ad is from a very different era, so the excessive dependence on the husband’s thoughtful act of buying insurance in time.
What the LIC ad did not address, this HDFC ad addresses. Here too, the wife gets the benefit of her husband’s timely insurance purchase, but that is shown not as her only sustenance but as a springboard for her to get back on her feet, independently.
This SBI Life ad sells fear pretty directly too – instead of the husband-wife dynamics, it uses the fear of a child, that gets tagged to the father. Once again, this frames insurance as a man’s job, or a man’s purchase, and assumes the man to be the sole breadwinner. I suppose insurance brands in India believe they are talking to the decision-maker of the purchase when they directly frame the man as the buyer of insurance.
These 2 ads, by ICICI Prudential Life Insurance and by the Life Insurance Council (that handles the category’s promotion much like how Association of Mutual Funds in India promotes the entire category through their relentless ‘Mutual Funds Sahi Hai’ advertising onslaught), use the very same narrative, using small, everyday nuances of care and protection as an analogy of the larger care and protection offered by life insurance. The latter even adds a layer of “You do all that, but hesitate to buy life insurance?” angle to question potential buyers.
I have always wondered what more could the life insurance sector use as narrative devices to
(a) communicate the need for life insurance
(b) communicate the urgency of the need
I recently stumbled upon the new ad campaign by US-based life insurance start-up Bestow, by the agency Preacher. They seem to have struck upon a fairly new angle to communicate both the need and the urgency.
The ads use peer pressure and FOMO in an unusual manner – here, the FOMO (fear of missing out) is being articulated by the peers to make it more pressing. The running joke is that, somehow, your peers and friends (social circle) know that you do not have life insurance! This is, obviously, not public information and the first ad even has a dialog that goes, “H..o..w…? That’s incredibly hard to find out!”.
But that’s the quirk in the series – assume it is public knowledge! How may they (your peers) convey that to you (the one without life insurance) in conversation? The ad uses the idea that they would be shocked that it was brave of you to leave your family with all your debt when you die! That’s dark humor used well to communicate both need and urgency.
Two out of the three ads inform women about the fact they do not have life insurance, unlike most Indian life insurance ads that exclusively target men. I liked the vibe in the 3rd ad the most, though, that features 2 brothers casually talking about one of them not having life insurance.
It’s also interesting that the urgency comes from the fact that not having life insurance would expose our loved ones to our debt, unlike Indian life insurance ads that focus on the ongoing expenses of our loved ones after we’re gone.
The print ads carry the same sense of irreverent humor.
