In December last year, Max Life Insurance announced a change in its corporate name to Axis Max Life Insurance, integrating two trusted names - Max Life and Axis - in the Indian financial services sector. This is a pivotal milestone in the brand’s evolution and is crucial for the insurance brand to achieve its long-term growth aspirations through strategic expansion beyond metros and Tier I cities.
Rahul Talwar, Chief Marketing Officer, Axis Max Life Insurance, says the move denotes continuity and building strength on the continuity. He says, “As a business and a challenger brand, we have growth aspirations. As a brand, Max Life Insurance was anchored in the value of customer obsession; we spoke about the pride, asset, trust (Bharosa) and emotion that our customers/prospects will have in their entire journey of being with us.” He continues, “If you were to dial back to April 2021, when Axis Bank - with whom we had a relationship from a distributor standpoint - became our co-promoter. Since then, we looked at our entire growth agenda to see how can we leverage the power of our two shareholders – Max Life Insurance and Axis Bank. We undertook a brand refresh exercise where we brought together the power of the two brands, Max Life Insurance as it was built and infused energy from Axis Bank. This exercise was backed by science, logic and research.”
With H2 being a crucial period for the life insurance category, the brand refresh was planned for December which also coincided with the business’ foundation day. Research agencies Kantar Insights and Chapter 5 were brought on-board for a qualitative and quantitative research. A key insight was that while Max Life Insurance franchise had strong equity in urban markets, metros and Tier I towns, the combined strength with Axis Bank gave a boost that could now be leveraged in Tier II and Tier III towns. Another unifying factor between both brand franchise
was customer centricity.
The refreshed brand identity is reflected in a new logo through the inclusion of Axis' 'A' and burgundy shade. The predominant blue symbolises trust, responsibility, loyalty, and calmness while the burgundy reflects a distinctive character, modern appeal and forward-thinking approach. The visual integration of Axis and Max conveys enhanced trust in the brand, encapsulating the spirit of ‘Double Bharosa’ (enhanced trust).
In 2021, Max Life Insurance released the ‘India Ke Bharose Ka Number’ that highlighted the company’s claims paid ratio number, 99.35%. Talwar says, “The brand embraced the emotion of trust under a proprietary platform called ‘India Ke Bharose Ka Number.’ We felt that Bharosa is a good starting point to have when we decided to
refresh the logo identity and entire communication platform. We picked up our existing assets, and that's where Bharosa, in fact, got doubled up, and the entire brand refresh exercise of Max life insurance is now Axis Max Life Insurance is anchored and called Double Bharosa.”
An integrated marketing campaign called "Double Bharosa” has also been released. Talwar says, “Brands are best understood when we play to existing consumer conversations colloquially and we have to ensure that the brand refresh exercise is colloquial and universal. As Axis Max Life Insurance, our entire products and services are now being delivered to our customers with Double Bharosa. The campaign of #DoubleBharosa cuts across multiple screens and media touch-points and we will build on this journey.”
In addition to building its strength in Urban and Tier I cities; Axis Max Life Insurance is also looking to leverage the stated vision of IRDA (Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India) of "Insurance for All by 2047," by looking at markets in Tier II and Tier III towns. Talwar says, “The larger North star of Axis Max Life Insurance is to be the most admired life insurance business in India and to play to the larger North Star of ‘Insurance For All by 2047.’”
The Reach Out
For the brand refresh exercise, Axis Max Life Insurance has adopted a mix of traditional mass media and digital. This has been boosted with below-the-line activations across its branches as well as the branches of bank partners, including Axis Bank, Yes Bank amongst others. Talwar says, “Our current objective is to create awareness for the brand and convert that awareness into consideration and eventually preference. Our media monies are deployed to these objectives. Performance marketing is important for our entire D2C play where we have a dominant position. As you're playing to the top-of-the-funnel, mid-funnel and to the bottom-funnel, you need to have a play of traditional offline marketing and online marketing.”
The Family Man
In 2022, the insurance company signed on cricketer Rohit Sharma and his wife Ritika Sajdeh as brand ambassadors. As a progressive brand, Axis Max Life Insurance chose to highlight the role of women as a participant in financial planning. Typically, the communication of Life Insurance as a product was spoken from the frame of the family and conversations around the category was muted or carried a sense of fear. Taking a divergent route, the brand chose to focus on talking to a young family which believes in mindful living and proactively plans for the family’s financial and health well-being and betterment. In addition, instead of fear that a life insurance conversation may have in any eventuality, the brand built its entire conversation around the family with communication being positive, light and lively.
Talwar shares, “In 2022, as a brand we looked at how we could resonate with our target audience. We realized that we needed to look at a relationship which was self-made, is inspirational, aspirational, and had the equitableness between the male and the female quotient of the relationship. We realized that Rohit Sharma and Ritika Sajdeh as a couple and individuals carry this aura and flavor of being casual, cool and calm, and we knew that we could place a life insurance conversation in that environment. When Rohit and Ritika talk about life insurance they talk about the mindfulness of the product and appeal to young families and millennials.”
The life insurance category typically doesn’t engage on a day-to-day basis with customers, with engagement usually around the time the customer first takes the insurance, renewal and payment of claims. With a focus to elevate the consumer experience, the insurance brand had introduced an AI-powered personalization across the board, starting with renewals. The AI campaign had Rohit Sharma as the face of personalized video with personalized video messages created for customers with innovations aimed to build strong lasting relationships. Talwar says, “The AI-powered personalized renewal campaign is an ongoing exercise to drive engagement at the point of renewal, and ensure that the individual re-evaluates their life insurances. Life insurance should not be bought once and forgotten, you can keep bettering the insurance plans.” He continues, “To drive engagement, we had AI personalized renewal messages with Rohit Sharma as a call-to-action measure. We have seen better engagement rates and better performance of these creatives. The idea is to play technology for engagement and personalization.”
Looking ahead, there will high amount of visibility of the brand to ensure that the larger ecosystem takes notice of the Axis Life Insurance. Talwar says, “We will see a good amount of communication anchored in either our products or services to ensure that we don't just leave the brand at a brand level. We try and land it via product and via services because that's how a brand would be able to resonate and drive growth and aspirations of the enterprise.”
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