Recently, the brand has launched a film in line with its philosophy of ‘Paison Se Badhkar’. Named ‘The Sweet Sound Of Wood’, it is the story of a man’s dream to see his daughter become a professional cricketer and represent the country. Sai Narayan, CMO, Paisabazaar.com, shares the insights behind the brand film campaign while speaking about the company’s initiative to move beyond transactional messaging, the evolution of FinTech and more.
Q] Tell us about the brand film ‘The sweet sound of wood’. What was the insight and inspiration behind the campaign? What metrics do you expect to achieve through the film?
The journey of telling brand stories started way back in 2018. Starting from Paisabazaar’s inception in 2014 till 2018, we’ve been advertising largely on TV and the digital, our focus being consumer acquisition and brand awareness. The overall communication was transactional because we were focusing on optimizing our marketing dollars. We also wanted to increase our free traffic, which was also the highest converting traffic. As a brand, we were not able to go beyond just transactional messaging. In 2018, we thought of breaking this mould and going beyond just giving you the best loan and credit card. The idea then occurred that can we be more than just money? That’s where we came up with the proposition to highlight human stories, which transcend monetary gains, and the ‘Paison se badhkar’ brand theme was born. The current campaign is not ad hoc, it is the third film modelled on our ‘Paison se badhkar’ philosophy.
It’s a journey that we started in 2018 with a campaign titled ‘The Wedding Speech’, which became a huge success while we were experimenting with the idea. We could see an instant improvement in the conversions of our existing digital and TV campaigns because that campaign gave us the courage to do tender stories consistently. Great engagement rates on our platform and massive positive social conversations around our campaign and our brand prompted us to do one more campaign. Thus we came up with the idea of ‘The Sweet Sound Of Wood’.
Q] How is this narrative-based approach working for you in terms of promoting the brand or its offering?
There are two aspects. Besides these two brand film campaigns, we run regular TV and digital display campaigns throughout the year. We want to position ourselves in the minds of consumers as a brand that someone aspires for. If someone takes a loan, there is a story behind it and we want to tell that story. When it comes to buying, consumers are buying the story of the brand philosophy as well. It has worked for us in terms of our conversion rates, which have increased over a period of time. Consumers are actually thinking of buying or making a repeat purchase since a positive brand impression is created on consumers.
Secondly, engagement with the brand channel increases on YouTube whenever we are running these campaigns, which invariably results in an increase in our subscriber base.
If tomorrow we launch an educational campaign, we don’t have to spend on the video because of our high subscriber base, we’ll start getting organic views.
ABOUT THE BRAND
Paisabazaar is India’s largest consumer credit marketplace with a 51.4% market share, based on disbursals in Fiscal 2020, as per Frost & Sullivan. It has 54 partnerships with large banks, large NBFCs and fintech lenders to offer a wide choice of lending products for consumers on its platform. These strong partnerships, built through technology and data integration with lending partners to provide real-time data flow and status updates, allows the Paisabazaar platform to offer quick decision making, ease of processes and faster disbursals.
FACTS
PR Agency: In-house
Digital & Social Media Agency: In-house
Creative Agency: Wavemaker (Group M)
PROFILE
Sai Narayan is one of India’s most prominent marketing professionals, having over 16 years of experience leading teams and creating compelling brand stories and consumer experiences. As CMO of Paisabazaar.com, Sai spearheads brand, digital marketing, PR and social media efforts. Prior to taking over this role, Sai was Director & Head of Marketing at Policybazaar.com Group.
Q] Financial literacy is still very low in India. What challenges do you face in terms of growing your consumer base due to this? What are your efforts in changing this?
The challenge is not just faced by us, but everyone in the space. Our content strategy is based on educating consumers. On our channel, there are hundreds of videos where we don’t do any brand-push. We just inform consumers about the benefits of taking a personal loan or about top 10 credit cards that are important to them, etc. Besides, we undertake a lot of PR initiatives, where a Paisabazaar spokesperson approaches various news channels and other financial platforms to talk about the benefits of educating consumers. We are also planning to come up with a consumer-education series either on TV or on digital media.
Q] With growth of Fintech, many players have entered the BNPL and credit segments. How are you standing out in the competition? What is your current market share?
Today, we are the leading player in the marketplace in India. Currently, our market share is 51.4%. In terms of the loan penetration, it is just two-three per cent of the overall category. So, our potential to grow is huge. We are working toward solving a consumer problem in the lending and credit space so that we can certainly stand out in the competition.
Q] How has your marketing strategy evolved? What is your current media mix, and how are you allocating your budget to different media?
Our marketing strategy has pretty much remained the same. However, what we will try and do is focus on customer education more, which was not part of our earlier strategy. We want to educate customers about the importance of all our core credit products. The other area of focus would be to invest more in the brand so that it helps us grow our free traffic. Our media mix is largely TV and digital. In the digital space, there is YouTube and Facebook, among others. Between TV and digital, our ratio would be 60:40 wherein 60% of budget is allotted for the digital and 40% for TV.
Q] How do you see FinTech evolving going ahead, with increasing penetration of mobile and is Paisabazaar ready for that evolution?
The entire industry is on the cusp of a great change in terms of growth in the FinTech and lending industry. Thankfully, Paisabazaar is very well poised, being the leader in our space and having started much earlier. The increasing mobile penetration will definitely give us an upward push in this already evolving space.
