Effies 2007: Cure for home loan disorders

Everyone dreams of owning a beautiful home, but when it comes to the daunting task of paying home loan EMIs (equated monthly installments), people wonder if their dream was worth the long-term burden. At the Effies 2007 case study presentations, Contract presented its work on HSBC Home Loans in the Integrated Advertising Campaign category.

Contract’s objective was to create differentiation for HSBC’s home loan variant, ‘My Home’, in the cluttered home loan market. It was found that most companies in the market had almost the same home loan offerings. Everyone was promising an “easy” home loan. Contract worked on the insight that although people were glad to take a home loan, the EMIs were taking a toll on their lives. The thought of getting into the cycle of regular payments was a burden for most couples.

Contract analysed how people behaved in the circumstances and termed their behaviour as ‘Home Loan Disorders’. It listed various forms of home loan disorders such as becoming stingy, irritated, tense, not going on holidays and having no money to spend.

The agency created a fictitious society called ‘Society Against Home Loan Disorders’ which ostensibly helped young Indian homeowners to cope with the disorder and enabled them to live life as usual despite the home loan they’d taken. The concept was made popular by using a multimedia campaign. The campaign started with teasers in metros and cities including Nagpur, Coimbatore, Jaipur, Chandigarh, Indore, Vadodara and Ahmedabad. The teasers highlighted the symptoms of home loan disorders and left the viewer open to thought. Some of the teaser lines included, ‘You never tip a waiter’, ‘You look 40, you are 31’, ‘You have a permanent frown’, ‘Your wife says you have changed’.

Road shows were organised in different cities in which people stood outside banks in protest gatherings, holding placards which said, ‘Defy the home loan disorder’. Radio ads talked about housewives calling up the Home Loan helpline and asking for help for their husband.

Eventually, the print, outdoor and radio campaigns directed consumers seeking answers for home loan disorders to a campaign-specific website, www.homeloandisorder.com, and urged them to send in SMSes as well.

The result was that the website received 2,000 responses and 36,000 hits and 4,000 SMSes. The brand awareness for ‘My Home’ increased by 7 per cent and demand grew from an average Rs 12 lakh to Rs 20 lakh. HSBC claims to have over-achieved its revenue targets by 35 per cent after the launch of the campaign.