Sign up for afaqs! Newsletters
Time to wake up to the call of health
ICICI Prudential Life Insurance has had health insurance products for the past 18 months, but it is only now that it is bothering to advertise them because the competition is getting stronger
Life insurance as a category has seen growth in India, but health insurance has hardly taken off, perhaps because of lack of marketing initiative. Currently, health insurance is available in the reimbursement format through MediClaim, which is offered by state insurance companies. But a large portion of the population is yet untapped. This scenario has led many private players to wake up to the enormous opportunity in the health insurance market. Players such as Bajaj Allianz and Star Health have already initiated marketing activities in this direction.
Watching television together |
Wife consoles tense husband |
Acting on his thoughts |
He blesses her when she sneezes ("Jeetey Raho") |
She blesses him right back |
ICICI Prudential Life Insurance has released a commercial for its health plans, based on ‘Jeetey Raho’, a corporate thought coined by its agency, Lowe, earlier in the year. Sujit Ganguli, senior vice-president and head, marketing, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance, says, “Getting (health) insured is not widely popular at the moment, but will soon explode. Our job was to convince people that they need it.” That is, along with promoting the company’s 20-year health insurance plan.
The ad opens on the shot of a couple watching television in their house. The soap opera they are watching has a woman pleading with her husband's boss for a loan for a health-related emergency in her family. Watching this on TV, the wife remarks that had she had health insurance, the television character wouldn’t have had to face any problems. The husband starts looking thoughtful, and the wife teases him that it’s only a TV show.
Next, the husband presents his wife with ICICI Prudential’s Health Insurance Policy (with a health-care guarantee of 20 years) and the wife gets all misty eyed. When her husband asks her why she is getting emotional, she blames it on the onions she’s been chopping. Just then, the woman sneezes and her husband blesses her, saying “Jeetey Raho (May you live long)”. In turn, she blesses him back. (Submit your opinion on this ad.)
The job is clearly to convince people to not remain in denial about their health – an insight that governed the life insurance category, too, a few years ago. “In a way, we’re playing a category role as well as a brand one,” quips Ganguli of ICICI Prudential.
R Balakrishnan (Balki), national creative director, Lowe, who has also shot the film, says, “People tend to forget that ‘this could happen to me’, which is what we’re trying to fix.” The target group is males, aged 35-45 years, currently not insured for health.