Keyword- Marketing Communication

Post title- Marketing Communications- Case Study of ICICI Bank/ICICI Bank Case Study/ Case Review- ICICI Bank/ ICICI Bank Marketing Communications Report

Page title- Marketing Communications- A case study of ICICI Bank

ICICI Bank is an Indian multinational bank and financial services company headquartered in Mumbai. It is the second largest bank in India by assets and third largest by market capitalization and offers a wide range of banking products and financial services to both retail and corporate customers through its branches and subsidiaries. From a comprehensive report by PGSEM students at IIMB, we try to analyse the effectiveness of the integrated marketing communications strategy of the bank. Positioning through promotions: Its tag line Hum Hai na attempts to reinforce its strategy of providing a comprehensive banking services and products to people across India from all sections of economic strata. It has consciously tried to position itself as a bank catering to all economic sections of the society, offering a complete banking solution. It has strived to market itself as a bank with a focus on making banking safer, simpler and smarter. It has tried to establish trust and credibility through the tag line Khayaal Aapka. The usage of Hindi in its tag line establishes its focus on the Indian consumer, including the rural segment. ICICI banks tag lines and advertisement themes have an emotional backdrop to them and hence have a soft sell appeal to them. The core focus has been to build a brand image of the bank as a trusted provider of all banking services with customer needs and conveniences as its top priority. ICICIs promotion strategy divided in to two areas Corporate Branding and Product Branding. Some of the promotional tools used are Advertising through traditional media (Reach and Frequency) TV and Print Media

Promotional material at channel partner outlets, billboards, signboards, kiosks at residential and commercial complexes and organizing events at corporate campuses.

ICICI has also done in-film promotions (Product Placement): E.g. Baghban, Cheeni Kum Co-branding through alliance with online retailing, ecommerce and travel websites

Association with IRCTC to offer mobile ticket booking services

Existing Promotions Existing promotions typically highlight the family aspect. They also highlight the convenience part as well, displaying aspects of neighbourhood banks. Comparative ads are common as well but generally softer comparisons without taking out names explicitly. Their faster service is in comparison to public sector banks. They use

children to highlight insurance, education & retirement plans. Orange colour background is used prominently as ICICIs theme colour.The ICICI Jingle used in Visual and auditory media

Existing Brand & Ad Analysis Advertisement campaigns ICICI Bank has run multiple successful advertising campaigns over the last decade. 2001: Safer, Simpler, Smarter 2003: Hum Hein Na 2005: Opportunities Unlimited 2008: Power of Belief 2012: Khayaal Aapka

The latest in the series is Khayaal Aapka campaign that was launched in 2012. We will be using this campaign as the focal campaign for all analysis and discussions.

Evidence of advertising campaigns being effective Millward Brown in its most recent release of the top brands in the world has ranked ICICI at No.63, down a couple of rankings, but highest in all Indian brands. The report states that: A major integrated financial institution, with offices worldwide, ICICI ranks in the BrandZ Top 100. ICICI competes with other growing Indian bank brands such as HDFC and Axis Bank. Even in banking, a global brand implies a greater sense of status than a local Indian brand, generally. In practice, however, people in smaller, rural markets may find that the Indian bank brand understands their needs more deeply. And government regulations may provide regulatory protection for the local brand. These types of third party endorsements are evidence of the overall effectiveness of the media campaign. Marketing strategy & Analysis: After the financial down turn in 2008-2009 ICICI bank moved to corporate objective of meaningful growth with the aim to have a profitable and sustainable growth. After that phase of consolidation of balance sheets, ICICI today looks to utilize the tremendous growth opportunities for the financial sector and to increase the level of penetration of the financial services including banking in India.

Chanda Kochar has also been quoted saying that there are enough opportunities in bottom-of the-pyramid & other rural markets. Competition is from SBI who is the market leader & there are players like HDFC & Axis who vie for the same target segment. The target segments have been upwardly mobile working class segment, NRIs typically in the SEC A-B class segments Positioning of products Typically, ICICI uses product attributes and price/quality to the minimum. Product user is the in prime focus. This is reflected in their advertising campaign where the user is the hero and the ad generally highlights the peripheral uses. They are one-stopshop and have used the same location for selling all products directly. The organization aims to build the pull for its products and this is evident in the advertisements it does for its various offerings. They do not use full service agencies and typically believe in giving the work it to the experts who are competent and good at what they do. They use many account managers to get the corporate vision right in their communication.

However, the entire positioning is managed centrally & there are no category manager or brand manager like the FMCG space. This part of the analysis was done using linkedin.com

This structure would fall under a hybrid model wherein the outsourcing is highly decentralized but the control is still at the corporate office and all marketing decisions are taken from headquarters. This is also evident why most ads are less creative & take the safe route to keep it as politically correct as possible.

Sample Campaigns: Here we take a look at a few sample campaigns. ICICI Bank The Khayaal Aapka campaign was launched in 2012. Ogilvy was the advertising agency assigned with this campaign. This campaign had a significant SOV on TV and later the idea was carry forward to outdoors as well as print ads. This idea was carry forward into the social media platforms as well. Contract was given to the digital media company BrandAppZ to run the campaign and they created a photo contest using Facebook as the social media platform. This contest was also promoted on contestdhamaka.com to reach out to the target group.

ICICI Lombard ICICI Lombard divided the marketing expense and message frequency on multiple platforms as 65% for TV, 15% for radio, about 10% each for outdoor and online for one of its campaigns for insurance. As per the executives, the online channels though more effective are low base channels so concentrating more on that may not serve the purpose. They do a lot of time-based advertising, example heavy advertisement during seasons of insurance (December to March) followed by a pulsating ad frequency. Associations with fulfilled promises were their core proposition during many of such marketing campaign. ICICI Pru Life ICICI Pru Life had a digital campaign with high emphasis on humour content using family values of love and commitment as core idea. This ad was broadcasted through channels such as Youtube & other social networking platforms. ICICI Direct ICICI Direct has launched a campaign to increase brand salience and awareness. The ad film showcases structures embodying investment options being moved across the world, signaling that it allows users access to the best investment options from all across. As my Arijit Ray said To amplify the leadership imagery, we had to embark on something that brought out scale and bigness in a treatment thats not seen before. The metaphor of Mega Move to capture the various investment options was just right

Source, Message & Channels Source Amitabh Bachchan is the brand ambassador for ICICI. Trustworthiness is often emphasised in the ad featuring Mr. Bacchan. Since the overall credibility of Mr. Bachchan is very high, same effect rubs off on the ICICI brand.

The source attractiveness of the ads is also high, owning to the fact that Amitabh Bachhan has high familiarity across Indian people. ABs similarity and association with middle/Upper class has touched the right cord and thereby building high brand value and top of mind recall. However, the brand of ABs itself was so high that his persona often overshadowed the brand of ICICI. That is why the company decided to use other campaigns mechanism to moderate the effect of AB.

In addition, the primacy effects of the ad are being ignored. This need to be addressed as the core messaging comes towards the middle or the end of the ad. Most of the advertisement message is verbal in nature & hardly any visuals are there which can be due to the category requirement & the seriousness prevailing in the company. Some of these issues were sorted in the Khayaal Aapka campaign where there is no use of celebrities and the context is much more natural.

ICICI has also used its corporate leaders as effective brand managers and PR ambassadors. Chanda Kocchar, CEO of ICICI, is a well-respected personality in the business community. She appears on national media to represent ICICI bank. Corporate leaders, prior to Ms. Kocchar, like Mr. Kamath too were utilized as brand ambassadors by ICICI to showcase the professional and expertise aspects of the company. Message Mostly ICICI bank conveys the message of family, togetherness, safety, good service etc. The contents are built around this theme in most of the advertisement. In a few cases, the banks own branch becomes the context for the advertisement. In some advertisements fear appeal are used showing death and state of no cash for product categories like insurance and retirement.

Print and outdoor media based messages are about the benefits of the products being showcased. While TV ads have an emotional appeal, highlighting specific products features or benefits. ICICI does not resort to any comparative ads as they are market leaders and has no differentiating element in this category.. Insight Though the goals of family & safety are the goals, there is a sense of boredom, which has crept in advertisement. Negative associations has become the norm in the communication message. The Khayaal Aapka campaign is an attempt to bring is some freshness into this context. Noise is another major part of ICICI ads. Often the peripheral route of persuasion restricts the focus on brand and turns into melodrama. The target audience is typically the new family man with 1-2 kids or a recently married couple from a middle class background. In simple terms they are focussing on simple people who have big dreams. Channel The preferred mode of delivery is mass media, as they need the pan India reach. TV remains its primary channel of communication closely followed by radio. Print media is seldom used, as apparent from the secondary information available in open. For securities & other services, they have begun to use online channels.

Analysis of communications Given that it is a credence-good, the Hierarchy of effects model play a major role in analysis. The involvement is higher as all transactions with the products deal with

money. However, the effective part of the ad is mostly visible here going by the AIDA model. It falls under the 1st grid which is the high involvement & thinking grid in the FCB Grid of learning, As mentioned in many research analyses, recall & diagnostics is the way to judge this brand. Media is typically long copy format & reflective vehicles while creative is specific information driven or demonstration driven.

When applied to the ICICI ads, the elaboration likelihood model shows that they use peripheral routes of persuasion instead of central routes for this product. They need to strike a balance between these two to ensure maximum campaign effectiveness.

Objectives & budgeting for the promotional programs Creating top of the mind recall is their major communication goal. Given that, their vision is to become and maintain the market leader position this approach works well. The data on communication-effect is unavailable. However based on our survey, we can say that often the ads do not meet the goals set for the communications team. Reviewing the communication based on DAGMAR, we find ICICI generally appeals to the Awareness part rather than the other 3, comprehension, conviction & action.

Advertising Creativity Divergence: Historically the ICICI bank ads have been quite uncreative as they lack originality & use old beaten up topics. Elaboration was used sparingly while the message delivery was quite dramatic.. The Ogilvy promotion for Unexpected Awards has been appreciated in the way it has brought in new way of storytelling to talk about the ICICI product. Relevance: As a critique of the Unexpected Awards ad mentions that even though the ad is very creative and endearing, he wasnt sure if the ad will be able to convey the message related to the new product. This reflects the challenges in designing a creative for a product that requires some explanation. Thus, it is not surprising to find that creative risks are very poor for this brand and can be attributed to many reasons ranging from the category & the seriousness of the brand.

The process: A lot of time & money is spent on account planning, immersing & digesting the problem at hand. Inherent drama is very high in the case of most of the ICICI bank ads.

Implementation aspects: The information & rational appeals are used to a limited extend. Emotional appeals form the major part of the communication. There is however no place for transformational aspects in the ad. Fear appeals are used to a great degree to showcase the height of emotions especially for life insurance and similar products. We feel that demonstration of use of services is a better approach than the Slice of Life format, as most of the products have a significant cognitive appeal.

Imagery: No good image of ICICI comes to mind for most consumers. Only the colour of ICICI is the forefront, which is quite common.

Drama: High degree of melancholic drama is used to showcase the Indian nature of storytelling. Jingles of ICICI have become quite famous though it has not created the kind of effect that Titan or King Fisher type brands have created.

Our assessment & consumer judgement: Creative approach is consistent with the brand Creative approach is consistent with creative objectives Does not give a clear & consistent message Ads are truthful but not very tasteful

Choice of media

Reach is the major metric for ICICI hence TV forms an important medium of communication. It is one of the most flexible ways to tell stories. ICICI concentrates on TV to provide maximum coverage. They also use childrens channels & sport channels to deliver their ads.

The demographic segment index is probably the highest for this segment & has high aided & unaided recalls. Given the category and low margins, sales promotions are not used. Our survey of buying power index showed us that the segment targeted has reasonable buying power and considers banking to be relatively cheap. Television Most of the TV ads from ICICI are aired on national television and cable networks. It is very common to see ads having an association with India catering to the ethnocentric nature of the target consumer. This is helpful in promotions used for NRI service offering from ICICI. They also sponsor events & support TV campaigns such as SME Expo Series, ICICI Bank - CNBC TV18 'Emerging India Awards'. Their main challenge is to break through the clutter of ads that vie for the same consumers mindshare. This has been one of the major challenges for the creative team developing the Khayaal Aapka advertisements. Outdoor According to Ronita Mitra, ICICI Bank corporate brand group head, the banking sector spends 20 billion on outdoor advertising medium which it find out to be more effective than TV. There are multiple challenges in measuring the effectiveness of this medium but ICICI has none the less experimented with a few creative in this media for bill transfer, fund transfer and movie ticket purchase. Measuring the before and after they were able to see a 50% improvement in the awareness of the associated products. Radio Radio not the preferred mode for communication due to the clutter. There is no imagery to support the high levels of verbatim. Local ads are expensive as the coverage is far lesser without any economies of scale. Direct Marketing There is no data on direct marketing spend but have a lot of channel partners to sell insurance & other products.

They are increasing time & money spent on the digital marketing efforts to break the clutter. Scheduling Banks normally use a continuous advertising exposure, though the ads go a little higher during the investment season which is different in different parts of India. Pulsing is the technique in general though they do not completely stop the ads. Conclusion ICICI follows a comprehensive IMC approach to marketing. With its new creative, it has been able to cut the clutter and reach out to its target audience. ICICI bank has built a strong brand, which they are using to reach out to suburban and rural markets driven by the vision of its executive team. We see two challenges for ICICIs marketing communications team. Keeping the creative ideas fresh and relevant will be one while integrating all the aspects of marketing communications would be the second.