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The insurance sector in India usually uses a few standard templates for messaging.
Price is one – this is the ‘we’re the cheapest’ pitch.
ACKO has positioned itself very well in this zone.
Speed is another. Under speed, it could be the speed of buying an insurance product or the speed of settling claims.
Policybazaar has a new campaign featuring Akshay Kumar for the latter – speed of handling claims.
The other perennial favorite of the sector is to induce the need for insurance and every single brand, right from LIC’s famous Doordarshan era ads, has pitched this positioning at some point or another.
For context, here’s Policybazaar’s new campaign on this positioning.
And LIC’s old favorite.
PhonePe received an insurance broking license from the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI) in August 2021. Since then, it has already launched a couple of advertising campaigns to (a) bring fresh insurance buyers to the platform and (b) upsell insurance as a product to existing users of PhonePe.
The first set of ads was national – in advertising parlance, that means ‘Hindi’. So they featured Aamir Khan and Alia Bhat and focused on vehicle insurance, life insurance, and health insurance. These ads were by Leo Burnett.
Beyond the generic messages, PhonePe and Leo Burnett also focused on the minor points. For instance – ‘no inspection needed’ (and hence, faster insurance renewal, going back to ‘speed’). The no-inspection point was made via print and TV ads featuring Alia Bhat during December 2021.
Then, PhonePe launched a regional campaign for vehicle insurance alone, and regional is advertising parlance for ‘those Southern States’ 🙂
Considering PhonePe’s national campaign spoke on largely predictable messaging (need, hassle-free, range, etc.), I was wondering if the regional campaign too would talk the same language.
The South campaign, by 82.5 Communications, while adhering to the ‘No tension insurance’ positioning from the national campaigns, also included the ‘no physical inspection of vehicle needed for insurance renewal’ as a benefit leading to quicker insurance purchase! But unlike the basic narrative of the Hindi/national (some dubbed variants too) ads, the Southern ads extended the story – instead of simply claiming that no inspection is needed, the story started with a guy waiting in his home for the insurance inspection to happen. His neighbor then uses the PhonePe app to perform a phone-based self-inspection (a point made fleetingly through the text in the Hindi version) and gets the policy renewed instantly.
Here is that ad, in 4 languages – cars:
For 2-wheelers:
Now, as someone who has always—as long as I recall—renewed my car insurance online, this inspection business seemed really odd and new to me. The only time a renewal happens is when I need to make a claim, and even here the insurance company worked with the service center (and not in my home) where I had given my car and made it hassle-free for me.
To get to this point on vehicle inspection, we need to first understand some insurance basics.
There are 2 instances where a vehicle inspection is not needed at all, as per IRDAI rules:
- When a vehicle is being insured only against third-party liability. Third-party insurance is the mandatory legal requirement in India. In vehicle insurance, the first party is the person who owns a vehicle and has bought the insurance. The second party is the insurance company. The third party is the person who is claiming damages caused by the vehicle of the first party. So, when you, the vehicle owner, are merely fulfilling the basic legal necessity with the bare minimum insurance (most 2-wheeler buyers), it is the third-party insurance, and inspection is not needed for it based on the simple common sense of what/who is being insured against.
- When you renew your insurance before the expiry date of the policy. As anyone who has ever owned a vehicle in India knows, at least 30 to 45 days before the expiry of any vehicle insurance policy, you are likely to be pestered not only by your own insurance company to renew as soon as possible, but also a dozen more insurance companies—all of whom have your entire astrological chart—who entice you with attractive offers to switch to them before the expiry of the policy. So, those who let their existing policies lapse are most likely to be the ones who are in dire shortage of cash, not the shortage of impetus or motivation or awareness of the lapse of the policy.
So when is an inspection required?
- When your policy has expired and you have crossed the grace period for renewal too, your policy has lapsed and you need to take a fresh policy.
- If you are switching from a third-party policy to a comprehensive policy.
Now, is it possible that the guy in the PhonePe ad who needs to renew his bike insurance (and is awaiting inspection at home!) has let his policy lapse, or is moving from a third-party policy to comprehensive? Of course.
Even though these have not been spelled out in the ad, they are legitimate use cases as well, as a result of which he is waiting for the inspection of the vehicle at his home.
The more pertinent question is this: are there a lot of insurance buyers who let their policies lapse, or who are switching from third party to comprehensive that there needs to be an ad campaign targeting such use cases/people specifically?
It’s possible that PhonePe or its agency managed to gather data from the insurance companies that there are indeed a lot of people like this, without assuming things based only on their own personal experiences. Then, it makes sense to present the phone-based self-inspection as an option for all those people who may have assumed that physical inspection is the only possible route.
This is especially interesting because I do not recall any other insurance brand highlighting inspection as a gap/concern worth addressing, in recent times. It’s possible that they may have deprioritized this as a minor nuance not worth marketing specifically, and focused on broader messages like speed, cost, etc.
The fact is that this inspection-related point (phone-based photo/video inspection is enough; no physical inspection required) is not unique to PhonePe (which does not have its own insurance brand – it’s only a broker, like Policybazaar) – it is the industry norm. So an ACKO, or HDFC ERGO, or ICICI Lombard, or any other insurance brand could have picked this point to communicate in a campaign too – but they haven’t, the way PhonePe isolated the problem (need to make time for vehicle inspection at home) and highlighted a solution (phone-based inspection).
For every other insurance company or an aggregator like Policybazaar, the inspection was perhaps an incidental point only worth mentioning on their websites (they all do!). But only PhonePe took a simple bullet point and blew it into a full-fledged campaign in 4 languages!
And now PhonePe is remembered for hassle-free insurance that includes the benefit of not needing a physical inspection of the vehicle. So even if people did not previously really bother about physical inspection, now they have been adequately educated by one brand about not needing one, and that it can be done via phone too.
As if on cue, ACKO added a keyword-rich (and useful) article on its website in the 2nd week of January 2022, around the time PhonePe launched its print and TV campaign. The article is titled, “”, almost as if anticipating a surge in Google searches for vehicle inspection during insurance buying 🙂
If the brand team had used its own experience and assumptions about inspection and disregarded this as a not-so-material benefit worth highlighting, it would have continued to remain as one of the many smaller points. But, possibly owing to better research and data, PhonePe and its agency have been able to blow it out of proportion as a feature that leads to the brand’s larger promise of ‘no tension insurance’ convincingly.
This reminds me of a point made by the great George Tannenbaum in a blog post late last year. He was quoting out of a set of notes titled, ‘Twelve Things You Should Know About Advertising’ written by Carl Ally, founder of the agency Ally & Gargano.
The specific point said, “Research. Research. Research. Find out as much about your product as you can. Experience it. Read all you can. Sometimes a fact you find on page 42 of an annual report can be the key to the whole idea. A minor detail can be a spark.“