2015 is set to be the year of the underdogs, according to Sanjay Tripathy, senior EVP marketing, products, digital and ecommerce, at Indian insurance brand HDFC Life.

As a provider, a man ensures his family’s financial independence during his lifetime and even after. But it is not just money that makes him irreplaceable; it is actually, all those little everyday things he teaches his family that eventually helps them to stand on their own feet. This is what makes the man special. HDFC Life has launched a new brand campaign after a period of five years that highlights how a man is hard to replace in his family’s life, not just as a financial provider but for the role he plays in ensuring that the family becomes independent and lives a life of dignity.

Taking this as a platform to leverage the ‘Sar utha ke jiyo’ story of HDFC Life, Leo Burnett has created a long-format ad film. Our aim is to highlight the crucial role a man plays in his family beyond playing the role of a financial provider. He subtly teaches his family life’s key lessons such as facing fears, believing in one’s self, living with dignity and pride among a host of other things. This campaign aims to honour such ‘hard to replace’ men.

How the consumer talks to you is now as important as how you speak to the consumer. And the former is an outcome of the latter. There was a time when the brand would communicate and the customer would receive it passively and the brand scores were the only yardstick to measure the success of this relationship. It was almost like a public speech. Today things have changed. From a public speech, brands have moved to a one-on-one conversation. The exponential growth of the digital medium is largely responsible for this.

The relationship is also now becoming a marriage of personalities. In today’s competitive scenario, product differentiation hardly exists. Consumers eventually get attracted to brands that they aspire to own or reflect their personality. It is much like a shift from arranged marriages to love marriages. But expecting Fidelity is hard. With the plethora of options available and technology redefining everything, it is becoming extremely difficult to keep a long term relationship going. Brands have to be agile and have to continuously keep pace with the consumer. Not for a moment, can the brand take the relationship for granted.

To me, 2015 will be the year of the underdogs. I have two strong reasons to believe so. Everyone will have money to grow. With the buzz around the economy reviving and extra inflows of foreign investments, all brands will be at par with each other in terms of spends. New entrants and relatively small players will spend extra money to cash in on the growth phase and catch up with the big players. It will be important to see how big players keep the new entrants at bay. E-commerce is already witnessing this and even in Life Insurance we will see this happen with the FDI cap getting removed.

With digital soon becoming a large part of the marketing plan, one actually doesn’t need large budgets to build awareness. The quality of content will define the ROI on what you spend and consumers will become patrons of your brand message; geo-targeting will help brands reach out to their TG with minimal wastage; and digital will help brands service their customers better and faster with lower costs.

Our digital strategy is to focus on multiple fronts, not just marketing. Our aim is use technology to remove barriers. We are investing a lot in content and conversations. Also, digital platform is so dynamic and evolving, that we have to constantly evolve and change at the same pace. A decade ago we wouldn’t have imagined Google Search to be such a huge contributor to the BFSI business. Social media was non-existent, and today it forms as the most important medium of engagement for us with our consumers.

The dream is to make HDFC Life a truly online insurance company, relevant to all. At HDFC Life we continue to experiment and try to innovatively connect and engage with our consumers. When GIFs were introduced on Twitter, we were the first brand to create real time GIFs. StandUpOnTwitter was one of a kind event where we used humour to create awareness of our brand. All of these activities have helped our brand recall immensely. We will continue to creatively tap the younger age groups while we work on creating the online journey better for our customer, whether it is purchase, discovery, education or engagement.