ICICI Prudential Mutual Fund Comes with a Year-Round Campaign

As published by Agency Reporter

Brands often ponder over what is the best time to talk about their products/offerings. What day, week or month is the most suited for a new communication strategy? Well, what if the answer to that was the entire year? 2019 might just be God’s gift to all AMCs. With the market conditions and volatility increasingly indicating towards SIP being the preferred choice of investment – the time could not be riper for a new investor education campaign.

The first ones to capitalize on this opening is one of India’s largest AMC, ICICI Prudential Mutual Fund. It has come with a year-round campaign called ‘Year of SIP’. To kick-off the campaign, the AMC has come out with a digital film called “Bahane Banao Matt, Bahane Dhundo”, also known as the “The Excuses End here.”

The film largely focuses on excuses that one uses to procrastinate a lot of important things in life, like investing. The film urges people to stop making excuses, and start looking for the right excuses to start investing. It places the market volatility as the ‘perfect excuse’ to start investing in SIPs. The fact that the release date of the film aligns with the new financial year – is the icing on the cake (a well-planned one).

The film and campaign is a result of the combined efforts of the ICICI Prudential Mutual Fund team and 26FIVE India Labs.

The start of the new financial year is the best time to create investor awareness around SIP. The video focuses largely on all sorts of inane, but counter-productive excuses one comes up with to not start investing, and in-turn putting their financial future in jeopardy. ICICI Prudential Mutual Fund, as a brand wishes to communicate to the people that the market volatility is, in fact, the perfect excuse to start a SIP, as they have historically performed better than other traditional instruments during such market conditions.

While most brands have always found it difficult to get the consumer to start something new, investing is no different. Many believe that investing is so easy, all you have to do is to tell people that it is good for their financial future and they would come barging through the doors with piles of money, right? Well, that is not the case.

And what was this solution? Ninad Vardam, Director, 26FIVE India Lab answers:

“ICICI Prudential Mutual Fund approached us with the challenge. The brief was sent to the creative team, and their solution was simple, but on the mark. How do you change human behavior? By tapping into their existing behavior. Sounds simple, right? It is, yet it yields great results.

The idea of tapping into people’s habit of making excuses to procrastinate their dreams, ambitions and perhaps just a hobby – aligned perfectly with how people come up with excuses to not investing. With this campaign, ICICI Prudential Mutual Fund is asking people to not come up with excuses, but to rather start looking for all the right excuses to start investing, and what better excuse can be there than you opening your newspaper in the morning and all the market factors clearly indicating that there has never been a better time to start a SIP than 2019.”