The banking sector has been an integral part of the marketing and advertising domain with new campaigns, product launches and offers hitting the market every other day. Marketers work round the clock to ensure that the word reaches the correct audience and achieves the objectives of the campaign.

And today to share more on the challenges and intricacies of the sector, we have one of the most established names in the domain – Ravi Santhanam, Group Head, CMO, HDFC Bank.

Excerpts from the conversation:

You have recently been promoted to Group Head and CMO of HDFC Bank. Tell us more about your new roles and responsibilities. 

At HDFC Bank, marketing should not be only about communication and creating preference for the products that we serve, it should be a direct revenue-generating function. Over a period of time, we, at HDFC Bank, have done a lot of work in terms of creating journeys for completing all that the customer would like to do with the bank digitally. This has formalized it as a direct-to-consumer business. And I've been asked to head that business. So, along with the bank’s retail products, even the SME ones that you can directly sell in digital form will come under this banner, including our new-age products. For example, our smart app Payzapp and Smarthub, which is for merchants, will come under this business and we want to run these as a separate profit centre.

You were very active on digital media this festive season. Would you like to give details of the break-up of your media mix in terms of digital vs traditional. How do you balance traditional and digital channels to reach and engage with your target audience effectively? 

For us, the media mix has always been a function of two things. One is a specific campaign with a very clear business and marketing objective. There will also be a campaign objective. So, when we look at the business objective, we might want to create a brand-level awareness for a specific product. The media mix model is defined depending on the objective.

When it comes to the direct-to-consumer business, for example, there are two roles that we need to play for today's consumer. It might be more about digital because at the end of the day, I'm targeting a specific cohort of customers who want to experience HDFC Bank's products and services. But for tomorrow's consumers, it will be more about the brand because we need to create awareness about our services and products.

Maybe you might think of purchasing a home, three or six months down the line. At that point, if I'm going to reach you and say that I have an offer, that's not the time to create a preference. So, you would like to do a lot more brand investments.

Today's customer is going to be digital in my view and tomorrow's will be more brand, which always lends itself to more traditional media.

Tomorrow's customer is much younger. Is he not more available on digital than traditional? 

I wouldn't want to go by demographic of age as a criterion. What we want to do is reach consumers where they are present. So, if you're present on digital media, we will reach you there. Most customers could be in the digital multilateration. But if tomorrow's customers are going to be seeing more television, like for watching sports, it allows us to do a lot more leverage in that short window of opportunity.

We're right in the middle of the festive season. We just had Diwali, and Christmas and New Year are on the horizon. Tell us how the festive period went for you and the entire banking sector. 

I wouldn’t know about the banking sector because it's too early in the festive season. Luckily for us this time, the festive season happened over two different months. If I remember last year, it all happened in one particular month. This time, Navratri started earlier and Diwali was in November. It gave us a long-ish window of opportunity to drive engagement across the ecosystem - across our entire loan products as well as retail assets. We do see an uptick in terms of consumption and even in terms of cards, which is a clear lead indicator in terms of how much consumers are willing to open up and what it is that they're spending on. We're seeing good traction.

This is a valuable input for other sectors. Are customers spending? There has been a discussion in the industry that they're not coming forth and spending. 

India has many Indias, so it depends on a lot of things. For example, premium products are selling in far higher numbers. We are seeing an A-shaped recovery but that doesn't mean the other side of the ecosystem is not improving. That's also doing better.

However, if I look from a bank's perspective, we are seeing a slightly different profile among our customers. When you're talking about a loan or card spending, they're slightly well-off customers but when it comes to FMCG, there is enough traction across all segments. We are seeing a lot of consumption across sectors - whether it’s apparel or jewellery or groceries, eating out, dining out, travel, and eCommerce, which has seen an increment.

For the last three years around the festive season, you've been coming up with a new campaign. This year it was‘Iss tyohaar no intezaar’. Tell us more about your campaign and how it did for you. 

We have gone for a small change this year. We have always laid a lot of stress on the offers that we bring for our customers during this time of the year. However, this time we have taken a big leap and put the bank in front of them. This time, we have created a platform called Expressway and that is going to serve customers going forward.

Expressway is a destination for all our bank customers. It is also for those who are not our customers. All can come in and see the kind of personalised offers available across the bank's product ecosystem.

Expressway has also been extended to our entire sales force. The sales force has created a QR for almost every sales force in the ecosystem with their specific details. So, when a customer is convinced about taking a product, the sales team just needs to show the QR customer scans and the digital application gets opened on their devices. The salesperson's credentials get passed onto the application without any intervention. We are seeing tremendous improvement in terms of the acceptability of Expressway across our customer base. Customers are experiencing a new way of consuming HDFC Bank products and services.

While most of your campaigns did well, one of them “Vigil Aunty” did not go down too well with a few netzines. They found it to be targeting a particular community. How much does that affect you as a CMO? Going forward will it change your brief to the ad agency? 

We don't worry too much about it. We can still go back to the drawing board and start thinking about the purpose. In the case of Vigil Aunty, the idea was to create a specific character on account of the large number of online frauds. As the biggest brand in the country’s banking sector, what is it going to do for the citizens? It's not about our customers but about the entire citizenry of India.

Every bank and every player in the ecosystem have been trying to create awareness but we still get multiple complaints every day from someone who has unintentionally shared an OTP or has been gullible at some point.

Our idea of creating Vigil Aunty was to create more awareness about how to protect yourself from the various kinds of scams.

We always benchmark against that purpose and say let's not get sidetracked. Anything that people talk about or outside of this is not worth it. The purpose we created for Vigil Aunty was fulfilled last year and this is why we for the second campaign under the same theme. Even last year, there were some murmurs about it. But this time, the murmurs became a little bit wider, what we looked at was that the option was very simple. First, what is it that we are trying to do? Our purpose was to fight frauds so let's go ahead and do that. And if that means making small changes then so be it. Again, the whole purpose was to fight frauds and scams. So, it's a simple shift for us.

Vigil Aunty is going to be there? There'll be another season, another campaign? 

You'll see that coming continuously.

Coming back to digital, you have been collaborating with a lot of influencers and actors. Now, credibility is very important for a sector like banking. And social media continues to be very unpredictable. What kind of checks and balances do you put in place, you know, when you select a person to represent your bank?

As you said, credibility. The first thing we will do is check for credibility. For example, if we are going to use influencers, we just go to their Instagram page, to their social media feeds and we come to know the kind of followers they have, and what kind of audiences they're attracting and what kind of content they're putting out. Once these filters are taken care of, I don't think that's a problem. You might have got one or two wrong instances. And then that's the nature of the beast, so you have to live with it.

As of now, we have not had one single bad experience so far and most of these influential activities are also very short term. They aren’t brand ambassadors and they're there for a very specific purpose of promoting a certain service or a product.

We believe the micro-influencer will continue to grow. Compared to say 20 years back, the choices of what you want to be and what content you want to consume both are changing.

So, you could be a fashion designer or a hairstylist and today people are okay. It is a career that pays you and the career has also got a lot of respect within the community compared to say 25 years ago. But things are changing dramatically. Now, if you're a hairstylist and if there is somebody who's good at hair styling, they have their own influencers since they are good. If you want to reach that kind of an audience, this gives us a much better ROI. That's why…

Do you have any numbers? How many influencers are you working with right now? 

This depends on a campaign. For example, during the Expressway we worked with 100 people. As of now, for Regalia Gold, we're working with just over 20 people. This audience is different because the followers are very different. For a very specific segment, we have people who are very interested in following that particular content.

Coming to another news for which HDFC was in the news was a merger that happened around mid-June. Tell us more about the merger. And if it has any challenges for the brand? 

It was the first company, which brought the thinking that you can buy the whole thing by taking a loan in India, because India had no mortgage market. And I stood alone and my father was a government employee. So you could get a loan from the government. HDFC pioneered the concept that any Indian could dream of owning a home. We will be able to provide your home and it has been 45 years that they have been in existence. They have created this market and they are the leaders in the market. And so, the Indian banking ecosystem started after that in terms of creating this home loan market.

From an economy perspective, it's a big multiplier on the economy. From a consumer perspective, it's an extremely long-term relationship. It's very emotional, home buying is not a ‘one of’ affair, it is very emotional in the families involved, a lot of thinking goes behind purchasing the home.

And if you're enabling somebody to own that dream of theirs, then you are also establishing a relationship which is going to help the bank at least for the next 10 years. So the merger happened, and another good thing about this was the HDFC staple of companies, whether you look at HDFC limited, bank, life, insurance or mutual fund, they all have a very similar major safety, stability, and trust. Kudos to all the people who have created this organisation, kudos to all the people who manage and run these organisations, they all have very similar brand metrics today.

So, for us, when we looked at the merger, it was very similar in characteristics. So branding, the merger, merging the brands, when we looked at it, we said wow, this is not something which I have done earlier in my life where there were two different kinds of brands coming together India to do a lot more because the segment of customers was different.

What specific challenges do you face in marketing HDFC Bank's products and services in the digital era? We've spoken about digital before. But you know if you can explain it to us more, how do you stay ahead because other banks are also doing it. So it's a very competitive space. 

Competition forces you to do better or keeps yourself on the toes and everybody does a lot of good things. You have to always see what is it that you can learn from them and how you can keep pushing them, they push us many times and we push them anytime. So that's a symbiotic relationship.

Moreover, we are competing with ourselves first actually. So how can we grab more of the opportunity that is available in this country. India is a $4 trillion economy and it has to become a 20 trillion-dollar economy. We have to be at least 10 times the size of what we are. And compared to the time I joined to what we are doing now is three times. We are a Rs 30 lakh crore balance sheet company today and it will become Rs 300 lakh crore for sure.

The challenge is always about being relevant and I don't think that foundation principle ever changes and being present for our customers. And I think that the two pegs on which we always evaluate, are you relevant for your consumers? And the relevance question keeps changing over a period of time. Maybe the relevancy was the availability of the bank branch next door, maybe the availability of an ATM, 10 years back. Today, the availability of all the services in a mobile that's the relevant change for people.

Are you going to be there in the media in which we consume, and then we are thinking about it? Are you going to be available? And that's the two questions which we keep asking ourselves and benchmarking against these two and keep moving.

Would you like to share insights on the future direction of marketing for banks, especially in light of emerging trends and technologies and how HDFC Bank play plans to stay ahead in this dynamic landscape? 

Everyone talks about Artificial Intelligence and large language models. We have always been a little bit ahead in terms of investing in certain areas. We may not know fully how it is going to pan out but we will invest in it and that has been the principle that we have adopted.

We invested in analytics and data science and have tremendous amount of first-party data. How do you leverage that to actually make yourself relevant again, for your customers. So, AI has been used by us also for the last four, five years in multiple ways. And I do believe there is a huge amount of potential when it comes to content creation, when it comes to a lot of areas in which we were not using.

So we were doing a lot of data-based modelling. Now, the unstructured data and the ability of Gen AI to leverage on the unstructured data that we have, because all the interactions with the customers, which are recordings available, updates, which are available SEM, these are all words, these are unstructured data.

I do believe that Gen A will allow us to be much more relevant to our customers going forward. How do we leverage what is happening? We are already in discussions with multiple partners with multiple people, putting an ecosystem in place to use these capabilities and the capacity of some of these kinds of new tools. How do we actually enable our customers to do more. And that's the space where I see a huge amount of work happening.

Traditional marketing in terms of understanding consumers will be there, maybe there is a new tool available for you to do it better. But still time spent in the market with the consumers will proceed.

Before I close and it's not an overstatement that you have been acknowledged as one of the best CMOs in the country. And even in global rankings. What advice would you offer to aspiring CMOs who just we're looking at you and want to be like you in some way? 

Thank God for all the things that have happened so far. Anyway, thanks to all the colleagues who have been talking with me and I learned a lot from everybody. The one thing which I always believe, you need to be challenged by good people around you. I always look forward to is to work with much more challenging and smarter people than yourself.

The other thing is that that many of us who came into this field are also engineers by profession. So we did have an understanding of Max, the large extent. That allows us to look at data and mix data and the consumer understanding together. I think, at least in most of the first party data companies, the marketing role will be a mix of a person who understands data analytics, and the consumer, and the media and the communication and all this stuff.

I think that is going to be the future for many of the first parties are companies where first party data may not be available as such, maybe the other set of brand communication people will get a little bit of a preference. Even those people are also looking for how to leverage data which is available, and they want to create that data because they don't handle first party data. So the whole thing is, be comfortable with as much of data as possible and be comfortable on the other side. Also, I think it has to be a mix that will work going forward. Because there's a lot of technology that has seeped into every game which we all work in compared to say five years back and 10 years back and things keep changing so fast, so it's better to keep yourself updated and take the plunge on the data side and take the plunge on the communication side if you're not and once you do that I think there is no stop.