INSURANCE SECTOR
ADVERTISING

Insurance ads in india have come a long way in the last three decades. Be it television commercials, print ads, or bill boards. The change is remarkably noticeable. Earlier most of the advertising in this sector tended to play crudely on our consistent fear of the future and the unknown. A case in point being the television advertisement of firms like United India Assurance, National Insurance and Oriental Insurance. All the aforementioned companies provided insurance policies for contingencies like fire, robbery and natural disasters. Television commercials of that time tended to be rawly cooked scripts put together in the doors of hard sell copy. All of them invariably, toyed with our fear factor. In the …show more content…

There was a distant difference in these two parameters from bank to bank. Hence, the USP of a banks ads would often be its high FD interest rates or lucrative savings account scheme. However, with liberalisation and regulation ensuring cut throat competition in this sector there has been a paradigm shift in terms of the approach and positioning axis of banks in India. Offering of tangible benefits has given way to the emotional juggling of intangible nitty-gritties like trust, pride and care. Banks now like to tout their all round customer services rather than concentrate on a particular service or offering. This is giving rise to a trend of institutional ads. But banks end up talking about their organisation more than its specialised services. For instance Kotak Mahindra Bank’s recent slew of 25 television commercials each of 10 seconds talked about turning 25 as a liberating and a memorable experience. Such an approach was unthinkable in the pre liberalisation days. Another example is Standard Chartered which annually funds the Mumbai Marathon, south Asia’s biggest long distance run in terms of no of participants. Over the years the brand equity of the brand has had a symbiotic relationship with the event. As the events stature has grown, so has the banks magnanimous reach. Standard Chartered today is seen as a philanthropic financial institution and a lot of the credit goes to the Mumbai Marathon. With the introduction of brand new services like ATM’s