Aviva logs on to social media to hook young parents

Aviva India has launched a campaign with the objective of making young parents realise the importance of financial planning for their child’s future.

The social media campaign features three 'webisodes' featuring brand ambassador Sachin Tendulkar. 'Padding up with Sachin' and 'Sachin off Guard' are up online, while a third will be launched shortly.

The campaign focuses on protection-related content, drawing comparisons from cricket. It is targeted at parents in the age-group of 28-44 years.

On the campaign, Rishi Piparaiya, director marketing and bancassurance, Aviva India, said,"We have some very exciting plans for the digital and social media space. We've been working on the child platform and how to build linkages between the child and the parents for quite some time. Insurance is a very non-engagement business and we wanted to get away from the boring stuff. At the same time we wanted to educate parents about financial planning in a simple planner. We wanted to also consolidate our position in the online insurance place."

According to him, while Aviva is at number 10 in terms of offline sales, it is in the top three when it comes to online insurance players. Fiteen per cent of the brand's sales comes from online, he noted.

He added, "In the ‘Padding up with Sachin’ series, each webisode starts with Sachin reminding the viewers about the importance of protection. In an age where the internet is about content consumption and engagement, pure play product messaging only disrupts the consumer’s natural web behaviour. This is where we believe that we have bucked the trend by using content creation, rather than content disruption, as an approach. Testimony to this is the fact that we have crossed one lakh likes on our Facebook page in a short span and achieved a high engagement score on Twitter. We believe that content will be key to scaling up and making Aviva the ‘buzziest’ life insurance brand online among their core target audience in this digital era."

On the thrust on digital and social media, he explained, "Marketing is fairly incomplete without digital media and social media. The key difference that social media brings to the table is that it allows you to have conversations with your customers unlike any other medium. It’s far more engaging and possibly the best way to reach your customer, in this day and age.”