HDFC Life wanted to reach out to its target customer segments
Owning identified customer segments is one of the key strategic initiatives of HDFC Life. The company identified four key customer segments. HDFC Life wanted to increase its focus on providing comprehensive risk protection – life and health – to these segments.
The lack of customer research on personal finance in India is a big challenge for the life insurance industry. HDFC Life wanted to understand the needs of these identified customer segments to devise more appropriate products for them, and to refine their own key marketing messages.
ValueNotes devised a Life Freedom Index to improve brand visibility and to get customer insights
ValueNotes suggested that an Index would enable HDFC Life to achieve both the objectives – to understand their customers, as well as strengthen brand visibility. The ‘Life Freedom Index’ (LFI) that was devised re-affirmed the company’s key message of financial freedom in their brand philosophy – ‘Sar Utha Ke Jiyo’.
The Life Freedom Index would serve as the primary benchmark for indicating how financially free urban Indian consumers were in terms of financial awareness, planning, sufficiency, and adequacy of planning. The Index constitutes five sub-indices: Financial Awareness Index, Financial Planning Index, Financial Sufficiency Index, Financial Adequacy Index and the Financial Liberty Index. These indices were arrived at based on qualitative and quantitative opinions of 1600 respondents across 11 Indian cities. Taken together, these six indices give a measure of the financial freedom of the target consumer segments – chief wage earner, wisdom investor, young aspirant and urban woman.
The survey questionnaire included questions to compute the Index, as well as those that helped HDFC Life gain a comprehensive understanding of financial awareness, aspirations and financial health of its target customers.
ValueNotes leveraged its presence in the financial space – through its financial portal www.indianotes.com (formerly ValueNotes.com) – to socialise the Index and publish blogs around the findings of the survey.
ValueNotes’ Life Freedom Index dramatically improved HDFC Life’s brand visibility and thought leadership
The Life Freedom Index provided insights into the current state of financial freedom of Indian consumers, their awareness about available products and life stage needs, the sufficiency and adequacy of their financial planning, and the psychological feeling of ‘Financial Freedom’ and ‘Financial Security’.
ValueNotes’ solution was instrumental in increasing HDFC Life’s brand visibility, and establishing it as ‘the’ company for insurance needs of Indian consumers.
1. HDFC Life organised three grand media events around the Life Freedom Index. These events took place in Mumbai, Chennai and Delhi and each event had a presence of over 50 television and print journalists.
2. In the first quarter, the index report was downloaded over 80 times, and its findings were used to write four articles and three blogs.
3. The Life Freedom Index received over 100 press mentions within the first quarter of its publication. Over half of these were in regional newspapers, thus giving HDFC Life the required visibility in tier 2 and tier 3 cities.
4. Premium Indian financial newspapers like the Economic Times, Financial Express and Mint covered the Index.
5. The Index generated healthy traffic on HDFC Life’s social media platforms.
