As competition intensifies in India’s BFSI sector with fintechs, neobanks and legacy players vying for consumer attention, Kotak Mahindra Bank has been steadily carving out a challenger position by blending cultural relevance with digital-first innovation. From leveraging AI-driven personalisation to reimagining affluent banking with Solitaire, the bank is reshaping how financial services engage with today’s audiences.
In an exclusive conversation with exchange4media, Kedarswamy Ravangave, Executive Vice President – Marketing at Kotak Mahindra Bank, discusses Kotak’s evolving marketing strategy, its shift towards outcome-based media, and the vision of building a “marketing OS” that could define the next decade.
Excerpts from the conversation:
Kotak is often seen as a challenger brand in Indian banking, with a distinct positioning compared to larger legacy players. How consciously do you craft marketing to amplify this challenger identity?
Absolutely, Kotak embraces a challenger mindset by fundamentally rewriting category norms. Our playbook is intentionally simple: don’t follow category codes, build cultural relevance and move faster than legacy players.
For instance, when the broader industry was focusing on transactional conversations, we launched Hosla, which is more of a movement celebrating ambition. While BFSI typically relied on brochures, we built hyper-personalized AI-driven pitches that adapt to individual requirements. Essentially, it’s a way of thinking: build cultural relevance and move faster.
Kotak has built strong equity around trust and innovation. How do you ensure this positioning resonates with younger, digital-first customers?
Younger audiences don’t respond to claims. They judge brand behaviour. Trust for them is earned through intuitive design, frictionless journeys, and contextual relevance. That’s why we’ve shifted from static messaging to dynamic engagement, where our content changes based on user behaviour at specific moments on specific platforms.
We’re building semi-autonomous workflows that respond to user signals, such as language, location, financial goals, delivering contextual nudges across WhatsApp, Instagram, or UPI journeys. We’re not marketing to Gen Z and millennials, we are co-piloting their financial experience.
How has your media mix evolved between traditional and digital platforms over the past few years?
Our media strategy has moved from channel-based to outcome-based. We now run a full-funnel, signal-led architecture, mapping each touchpoint to the customer journey and optimizing assets for both brand equity and performance.
We’ve consolidated under a single agency, Dentsu, to drive efficiency and learning across the funnel.
We don’t think of media as traditional vs. non-traditional. TV has evolved to CTV and print to AR-enabled print, everything is current. The real game-changer is measurability. Earlier, campaigns were evaluated postmortem. Today, outcomes can be tracked daily, so we invest in whichever medium delivers most effectively—TV, print, or digital.
How have your advertising spends evolved over the last couple of years?
Our investment philosophy is rooted in responsibility, we spend on outcomes, sharpened by cohort-level targeting. As our ambition grows, we invest more, but every rupee is assessed for effectiveness and efficiency. The ROI mindset drives everything.
Kotak recently launched Solitaire for the affluent segment. How does this offering fit into Kotak’s overall brand and marketing strategy, and what’s the approach to positioning it - are you leaning more on exclusive, experiential channels than mass media?
Solitaire isn’t just a programme, it represents our flagship shift from transactional banking to lifestyle-led engagement. It’s built around three pillars: exclusivity, superiority and hyper-personalisation. We didn’t launch it through a single TVC, instead we launched with over a lakh personalised invites and pitches based on individual financial profiles, aspirations and language.
Our media stance is “sharp-shoot, don’t blast”. We prioritise curated OTT platforms, CTV, and LinkedIn, along with invite-only micro-events where consumers experience the proposition first-hand. Mass media isn’t off the table, but we use it to add structure, not noise.
For Solitaire, we’ve adopted a precision-led, mobile-first approach targeting affluent profiles using powerful signals like CIBIL scores, tax filings and consumption patterns. We’re not just buying media anymore, we’re engineering attention. The media plan includes gaming integrations, influencer storytelling, LinkedIn content, programmatic DOOH inside our branches, and branch-as-media pilots.
Will affluent-segment products like Solitaire become key differentiators in Kotak’s next phase of growth?
Certainly. The affluent segment is fragmented and often underserved with siloed, impersonal wealth solutions. Solitaire unifies credit, investment, and lifestyle benefits, extending privileges to families, not just individuals. In a commoditized BFSI landscape, differentiation comes from experience, not just products. Solitaire is designed to be the gold standard of that experience.
Kotak has leaned on humour and simplicity in several campaigns. Do you see that as a deliberate brand tonality to stand apart in BFSI?
Yes, but always context-driven. Very few BFSI players speak the language of lifestyle, and we see humour and simplicity as ways to humanise finance. ‘Hosla Hai Toh Ho Jayega’, Independence Day, Rakhi, these were witty, slice-of-life, and culturally resonant. But for Solitaire, the tone is aspirational and exclusive. We let the audience and context dictate the voice, not just the category.
Kotak has a strong urban presence, but Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities are now driving growth. How do you approach marketing differently for these audiences?
We go in with precision and a very local strategy. The audiences there are digitally fluent but culturally distinct, so our campaigns are multilingual, and regionally nuanced, blending digital convenience with human assurance.
We go beyond dubbing, using visual dubbing so the protagonist appears to speak the audience’s language. That detail reflects how deeply we value cultural connection. In short: we design for aspiration but deliver with empathy.
Trust and transparency are critical in BFSI. How do you communicate these values without sounding “preachy” in your messaging?
Trust should feel intuitive, not instructional. We treat it as a behaviour, not a message. It’s built more in low-stakes moments than big declarations. So it's embedded in how we simplify onboarding, visualise journeys, use human language instead of jargon. We don’t declare transparency, we demonstrate it: warning consumers of risks, helping them understand if something fits them. These behaviours result in trust.
Kotak has been innovative in integrating Bollywood, cricket, and pop culture in campaigns. How do you decide which cultural touchpoints to tap into?
Cultural touch points aren’t decorations, they’re strategic levers. Every choice must deepen emotional relevance. With Solitaire, for example, we lean on OTT, influencers, and LinkedIn because they mirror our audience’s lifestyle and identity. Cricket or Bollywood only feature when they align with the brand’s ambition and optimism. Culture is interpreted, not blindly followed.
Kotak has been at the forefront of digital-first campaigns. How do you see the next phase of BFSI marketing evolving - will it be more data-driven personalization or more brand storytelling?
The biggest opportunity lies in building semi-autonomous marketing engines powered by AI, ones that orchestrate creativity and data to make decisions in real time. We are moving from campaign calendars to intelligent systems that sense, respond and evolve continuously. We’re investing in agent-led AI to power content, media, measurement and journey orchestration, resulting in marketing that scales with precision, not volume. This will rewrite what we currently consider “best practices”.
With UPI, neobanks, and fintech players aggressively targeting the same consumer base, how does Kotak plan to stay culturally relevant and digitally competitive?
Published On: Aug 21, 2025 9:04 AM
We see them not as competitors but catalysts who have raised the bar on speed and simplicity. We’ve responded by re-architecting how we engage. AI is now embedded across our marketing stack, ensuring we operate like the most agile fintechs but layered with the bank’s inherent strengths: trust, scale and regulatory depth. Our journeys are omnichannel, digital-first but human-assisted. We aren’t mimicking others; we’re evolving the entire category by fusing tech, trust and cultural convergence.
Looking ahead, where do you see the biggest opportunity for Kotak’s marketing to create impact in the next 2–3 years — product innovation, consumer experience, or new platforms?
Looking ahead, what excites me most is the semi-autonomous marketing engine we’re building, I call it the new ‘marketing OS’ for Kotak. This won’t just be a tool, but a growth and reference engine orchestrating everything we do across the funnel.
Solitaire is already a glimpse of that future, showcasing hyper-personalization at scale, emotionally resonant yet operationally intelligent. Over the next two to three years, we aim to deepen this model across three vectors: product innovation, by designing offerings around life stages, aspirations, and family ecosystems; experience personalization, by shifting from segment-based to moment-based fulfillment; and platform thinking, by evolving Kotak Studio into a cultural engine that blends finance with storytelling, massively powered by AI.
.jpg)
