ICICI Prudential: Aspire to retire

Doodling through a lecture or being the best bowler in college might not have led you to a career of a cartoonist or a cricketer. Instead, life’s many demands probably saw you slogging at a “9 to 5” job. But ICICI Prudential tells you that your dream occupation can happen after retirement. Its new campaign calls retirement the world’s best job.

It is actually a well thought out response to a tricky problem marketers of pension products have faced in the country for a while. Planning for pension ought to be a huge issue for Indians, given that half the population is below 30 years of age. Yet, very few actually plan their retirement. As much as 96 per cent of India’s working populace doesn’t have any formal provisions for retirement, according to an Oasis Committee Report.

This reiterates both the huge scope for private players as well as the difficulty in convincing potential customers. At stake is a pension market of over Rs 8,300 crore (based on individual weighted premium), 34 per cent of which belongs to ICICI Prudential Life, according to IRDA. To tackle the challenge, ICICI Prudential is attempting to move retirement planning up the aspiration chain so that instead of looking at retirement as a compromise, customers put it on top of their priority list.

Sujit Ganguli, senior vice president and head (marketing), ICICI Prudential Life, says: “Instead of continuing to talk only about how people should plan for retirement, we wanted to make them feel excited about the planning process.” So, the television commercial shows how a man pursues his many dream jobs after retirement fuelled by the monthly cheque from his pension fund. In addition, the insurer has lined up a microsite (www.retirementbestjob. com) that will walk customers through 30 passions to follow after retirement.

Amer Jaleel, executive director of Lowe India, the agency which came up with the ad, thinks the campaign will bust the cliché of reminding people to plan for retirement. Few young professionals, who are the target audience for the ad and will retire in the next 20 years or more, according to Jaleel, believe in the traditional concept of retirement as a time to sit back and play with one’s grandchildren. “The idea of relaxation has changed. They would rather see themselves in some occupation or the other. Retirement is being regarded as a second career,” he says.

The insurer and the agency tested their idea among focus groups and claim it resonated overwhelmingly across all sections of the audience. “We tested out the concept for four months across people from all walks of life because we wanted to be sure that people are really attracted towards this concept and find it relevant,” says Ganguli. The positioning could continue for the next two years (the campaign runs for the next 20 days), with ICICI Prudential earmarking one-fifth of its marketing spend for its retirement products, though these constitute over 40 per cent of its product mix.