 2022 and what a day it has been can I please request everyone to kindly settle down thank you well ladies and gentlemen I hope that you all are energized and ready to welcome our valedictory speaker and the jury chair for the pitch top 50 brands please give a huge round of applause for Mr. Sarah Veer Singh CEO PolicyBazaar.com in his address Singh will speak on PolicyBazaar's consumer centric focus to becoming a market leader. Good evening everyone we normally in policy without people to respond so I'll try again good evening everyone thanks I know I'm sure it's been a long day so I won't trouble you too much but let me on behalf of everyone first thank exchange for media for putting up this wonderful event I hope you had a nice day and interesting day obviously you know when I think Dr. Bhattra and some of the organizing team reached out to me to talk about being part of this jury one of the things that I felt was that the reason or rather I felt it's worth doing is that finally all of us are in the business of brand building whether we call ourselves chief marketing officers or whatever title you know you prefer whether you're in advertising or whichever side you are on the of the table you're on finally what we are all trying to do in many different ways is to build a brand because finally a brand is a point of differentiation finally the objective of a business is to make money at least in the conventional sense and money can only be made if there's differentiation if you're a commodity it's really hard to make money and all of us are finally trying to escape that reality so I always tell our team that we are in the business of brand building whether we like it or not whether we you know call ourselves a market here or not the the other thing I just want to share with you at Policy Bazaar that while you know we have almost 10,000 people I'm blessed to have a team of over 10,000 people but at the end of the day today we spend more on marketing than we spend on operations so for us and I'm sure this must be a reality for many companies that marketing is the most important element of our business mix and it's something that I dare say still doesn't get in my opinion the kind of I would say the respect or the due that it should get there is a tendency and I believe and I blame myself for it and I blame some of other people who are in marketing for it because I believe that we tend to trivialize it to some extent we we say that it's a you know quote unquote creative profession it's something that it's a whimsical thing which only a few people can understand and the rest of us you know have to kind of nod along and I think we do ourselves a disservice when we do that and I'll explain why the disservice is that see if you mystify something it gives you a little bit of pleasure for that moment and obviously makes you feel part of a cult but actually if it has to be a mainstream activity you have to allow transparency and I always say you have to allow sunlight into the room so I know there are many senior people in marketing here so my request to you and that's always by request to Sai who's our CMO also is that you have to engage with the rest of the team you have to engage in the conversation to say why marketing is a very good return on investment and you need to defend yourself and both quantitatively and qualitatively I think we must respect the rest of the community the business community I think they are smart enough to understand qualitative arguments also so it's nobody's question that everything is quantitative and it's something that can only be done in a numerical way but it's something that we should talk about so sorry that's just my small pitch for focusing on this side of marketing as well also want to talk about the process you know we were part of a jury to select the top 50 brands again it was an exercise that was made very I would say it was very liberating the exercise because one of the things that exchange for media said was that this is not a quantitative exercise but it's an exercise of your opinions so we put together this jury the jury was made of diverse people you know from different industries different parts of I would say the marketing chain and I think people were allowed to express their opinion so the final shortlist or what you'll see towards the end of this evening is a reflection I would say as much of the jury and their opinions as it may be of any kind of you know very very objective measure so I think that that's really good I think one should you know in this era where we obsess over numbers it's also important to obsess over opinions but of course hopefully of the right people so as you see that shortlist I hope you will agree that it was selected with some care and I think it represents some of the good work that brands have done over the last year or so now let me turn to the subject this evening which is to talk about the policy with our journey now first first let me set the context for you about insurance as a category now policy with our was started 14 years ago in 2008 the the landscape and I would dare say it's the landscape even today was that insurance was a category which was sold not bought so there were very few people who woke up in the morning saying today I want to buy insurance right mostly it was somebody was an agent who came to you or you went to a bank branch and somebody pitched it to you agents typically tended to be so-called family friends or relatives and the idea was that they would explain to you why you should buy insurance and the challenge with that was that obviously they pitched products that were suitable more from their perspective necessarily not necessarily as much as from the customer's perspective so the very idea of policy with our was to stand in opposition to that to say that we would take a customer-centric approach and we would say that we will pick products which are good for the customer believing that in the long run what is good for the customer will be good for the company now let me explain what I mean the challenge in India is that we are still a developing country you know whatever our per capita income is two three thousand dollars what that really means is that as a country we do not have the means to actually offer social security so if if something happens in a family there is a death or disability or any kind of long-term disease the the person for to whom this happens it's not just an impact on that person but it's an impact on the whole family and I'm sure some of you would have had that experience that the entire family is set back by a few generations because it takes time to dig yourself out of that hole and what we believe is that insurance is a solution to that problem as you can imagine it's insurance you collect money from a lot of people and you pay out to the few who need it so we believe that this is a wonderful sort of if you think about it invention this was invented about five six hundred years ago after the great fire of London and this is a wonderful thing especially in the Indian context now if you marry these two things the fact that there was no pull platform and the fact that it's something that is really good for people we said that we should create an awareness and create a market for this and if you think of the key marketing challenge right what was the key marketing challenge the key marketing challenge is to build awareness for these types of insurance because the agents are not selling health insurance and term insurance they are selling savings products which are good because you'll have tax saving for ATD or whatever the story is and they are selling products which are good for them so first was to create an awareness that you need this insurance because people were not even aware of that now the biggest problem in creating this awareness is that people first reaction is that i know all these stories i don't need to buy this i'm not going to die i'm not going to have any health problem it happens to other people doesn't happen to me second problem if you convince them that yes it could happen to you then they say that i don't need to buy it now i'm quite young i'm only 30 or 35 or whatever so i don't need to buy it now i'll buy it later so if you think about it the core problem is procrastination or inertia a lot of people are aware that insurance is good for you but they're not willing to commit or they're not willing to buy and the response that our team and we have created over the years is always been you'll find that we have very hard-hitting advertising sometimes to the point of antagonizing consumers people say that this you're showing us too dark a picture but we believe that if we don't do hard-hitting advertising a person just watches the ad and then moves on so if you will see that in insurance many times people use you know happy advertising you'll have a happy family and the happy family will say i'm happy because i have insurance regretfully those kind of advertising does not work it does not lead to any action and it goes away so we've always believed that the core insight is against procrastination and you have to focus on it there have been almost i would say three parts to our journey over these last 14 years the first part was really to bring transparency to insurance to talk about what is the good what is the right product and we started by by basically trying to explain that this is a comparison platform so the first ad which was very effective but caused a lot of consternation in the industry was we said that don't buy without comparing and as you can see we actually had an agent dressed as a ulu and you can imagine why this led to certain we were also i think a young company or startup and i think we maybe over did the whole thing the second creative on the right is a slightly better version of the same where we said where we showed a mother who basically intervened and said don't buy without comparing so the first platform or the first positioning that we took was of an aggregator platform people were used to that from travel and other industries and we said that please compare before you buy and again in as much of a hard-hitting manner as we could this was the first phase i would say three four five years the amount our outlets at that time were also very small we were still growing as a business but we took this leap of faith because as you know that unlike digital or performance marketing brand marketing has very little you know direct return or returns on day one and to overcome this point because this is something that is very important for us we actually created our own metrics as to how to judge whether an ad is working or not working so instead of the normal language which is around you know rating point which is around visibility which is around you know frequency etc etc we use a very direct metric which is the number of leads that we get on any particular day and we actually measure the leads by hour by you know by minute whatever you want to do and we try to measure the lift that we get from our ad now many people have told me that this is a very short term and maybe somewhat you know extreme approach to measurement and to but I think if you think about it it's a easy to understand approach we are I think mature enough to understand that not all advertising leads to similar lifts so it's not that we panic if the lift is not as much as the previous ad had or something but it allows us to have a common language in the company and we are able to actually see you know what what kind of response we are getting the second approach that we platform that we took after the comparison when we realized that comparison was not enough they weren't enough people who were interested in insurance so we actually stepped back and took actually a bold call to focus on category creation so the first ad is for the first time in the insurance industry so it's an interesting thing that if you think about it that in such a old industry which has been around which has such big brands in terms of insurers we were the first to bring really a big time film star into the into this market we spent a lot of money at that time compared to what we had and to bring Akshay Kumar and I think that served as a the whole objective was to break the clutter to show that this is a really big thing and Akshay didn't talk about policy bazaar he spoke about the need to buy term insurance so this ad is a Yamraj ad where basically you know we show that if you die without having term insurance what is the problem that you leave for your family similarly the ad on the right has a similar concept that a person who has died has not bought term insurance this like I said this sometimes puts us in opposition to certain society sensibilities etc but it's a fact of life I think none of us can get away from it and it's something that we do we try to use humor to kind of cut the edge so that it's not super direct and makes makes people feel too bad but it's something that we feel that has to be done so category creation was the second phase of our journey again we continue to do that even today if you see we have campaigns around the year and we some of them are for category creation some of course talk about policy bazaar then the third phase which started about two or three years ago was when we realized that let me back up a bit we actually saw in two or three industry surveys these were surveys not done by us but when customers were asked or consumers were asked insurance what is the brand that comes to your mind we were surprised to know that after life insurance cooperation and then some people would say one of the big bank brand and then second or third would be policy bazaar and suddenly we started also seeing enough feedback one very important thing that customers started telling us that we buy policies from you you need to service our policies we don't care whether we bought x-brand or y-brand policy bazaar has sold this brand and you have to service these policies and I think for a while the consumer was ahead of us like if I was honest but once we realized this point we put in place a huge service network today you know I'm very proud to tell you that we have a person in 114 cities in India many of us can't name 114 cities I can bet you and we offer 30-minute claim support so if you are in any of those cities if you go to a hospital and you need help our person will show up in 30 minutes so this was a very powerful proposition again we backed it up by using our precious time that we had with Akshay to say that this is something that we can provide now this was a huge leap of faith because if you remember I told you that we measure everything in terms of leads now these kind of this advertising will not result in direct lead creation because people may or may not you know feel the need but this was a leap of faith I think this was we were maturing as a company as a as a brand builder and we said that now our customers expect this and we need to provide this so this was I would say the third phase so today if you see we are between the second and third phase we alternate between category creation we spend a lot of money still on category creation and of course we also talk about claim support and various other things that we do now this been another part of our journey which is in terms of how we have been guided by customers or consumers and what I mean by that is that we get three different types of consumers especially early on if you think about it the digital medium was a slightly exclusive medium it was used by the fluent it was used by you know people who are better educated and of course that has changed dramatically in the last two three years now the digital medium the digital consumer is as mainstream as I think any other consumer and initially there were a lot of people who were happy to buy on their own so there was there is still a set of people who come to policy bazaar they in fact sometimes get upset by our calling and they prefer to buy on their own so one of the things that we've tried to do now is to create a clean journey for if you want to buy on your own the second thing that we've always had is telecalling support because we understood that insurance is a complex product people are not able to buy on their own even so-called educated people find it hard so we've always had telecalling support and that's something that we continue to do now we have tele video etc about a year ago we added a new leg to our journey and this was again because of listening to consumers what consumers told us especially in smaller cities was that they don't buy from us because there is no physical person they want to meet a person now this was a bit this was actually a very I would say polarizing debate in our company because the feeling was that as an online as a digital company we are going in the wrong direction why are we you know introducing an offline element to our journey and we I will say that we debated hard we did a lot of pilot we did a lot of work to see whether this makes sense both from an economic perspective as well as from a consumer perspective and what we found that the answer was an unequivocal yes and in hindsight it seems a bit bizarre that we spend so much time debating this obviously people prefer to buy from other people they start the journey on policybazaar.com so all journeys start from policybazaar.com but they feel that they feel more comforted they feel better if they are able to speak to a person now this is a this has huge logistical implications but I think you know if you want to do well in India one of the things is that you have to embrace operational complexity and it's something that you cannot shy away from and I think I'm really proud of our team we did not add any you know sort of external experts or something the same team which had built the call center business has built this offline business we are today present in 65 cities so in 12 months we went from zero to 65 cities and we are you know able to serve customers about 20 percent of our business now comes from the offline business and I feel that a large portion of this 20 percent is incremental this is business that would not have come to us if we had not embrace this journey. I think the last part that I just want to talk to you about is something again that we have changed in the last few years that in marketing I think there are at least the way I look at any business there are two moments of truth the first moment of truth is when a person selects the product so you do whatever you can to make them select your product and the second moment of truth is when they use the product and in insurance it's a very interesting business we are a pay now and use later product right in fact pay now and hopefully never use later product now that creates a very very unique dynamic at the end of the day India has still a low trust society so what happens is that people are very skeptical that if I pay now will I ever get anything will you find some reason to deny my claim will there be some you know fine print that I didn't understand and you'll deny my claim so what we said was that we have to address this second moment of truth head on and we can't shy away from as somebody who wants to build a category as someone who wants to drive penetration so this is just an example we have put in place a huge claims support infrastructure now as I mentioned to you we have offline support we have online support and what we now do with insurance companies is what we call claim samadan where if somebody has got a claim and believes that they have been wronged or you know they were right and they were not given a claim we actually organize so this gentleman is from an insurance company and you know these are two customers we call them we give them lunch and then we say that please sit together and work it out of course not all claims get worked out but it creates a positive dynamic both with the insurance company so I must tell you that creating this dynamic with the insurance company is also very important because for the first time there is a company which is so keen that they are calling you know customers to solve problems and consumers also appreciate it even those for whom the claim is not approved do appreciate the fact that we brought them together and we made this effort so this is our most recent and I would say newest effort with that we are doing to build this category and hopefully you've seen through this journey that right from the beginning till now Policy Bazaar has focused on building awareness I like to say that there was a line in that movie bend it like Beckham I don't know if you've seen it I'm hopefully many of you would have where she says that you know you have to bend the rules and not break them and if you see that has been the journey of Policy Bazaar also we have bent with the consumer we have listened to the consumer and I think more important sometimes there is this feeling that the consumer will tell you everything honestly the consumer cannot tell you everything the consumer doesn't know himself or herself what they want but what you can divine through what they say and through what they do so the most important thing is to see what they do versus what they say and there if you follow that then slowly you can go with the consumer and do fairly transformational things so I would say that's been our journey I encapsulated by saying that we are moving from transactions to trust that's really the journey that we are on I'm sure there's a long way to go but I would like to say that we have made some progress and it's something that we'll keep going thank you