We are on the journey of moving from transaction to trust: Sarbvir Singh

Sarbvir Singh, CEO of Policybazaar.com, delivered the valedictory address at Pitch BrandTalk 2022 where he summarised the brand’s journey in his session “Policybazaar's Consumer-Centric Focus to Becoming a Market Leader”.

Singh opened his address by sharing how Policybazaar approached marketing and business. “The objective of a business is to make money in the conventional sense, and money can only be made through differentiation and not by being a commodity. So, fundamentally, we are in the business of brand building. At Policybazaar, at the end of the day, we spend more on marketing than we spend on operations as it is the most important part of the business mix and it still doesn’t get enough due because we tend to trivialise it.”

India as a country has a very low internet penetration and to make things worse, being a developing country, we don’t have the means to offer social security. A disease or disability in the family impacts the entire family and it is set back by a few generations.

Sharing the role and challenges of being an insurance aggregator, Singh said, “Insurance is a great invention, especially in the Indian context. When we married the fact that there was no platform earlier and insurance is a really good offering, we thought of creating awareness and a market for this. The key marketing challenge was to build awareness about various kinds of insurance products rather than just savings, and also tackle the mindset that people think that they don’t need insurance. The core problem therefore also was procrastination or inertia.”

Policybazaar as a brand positioned itself as a comparison aggregator platform first, and then went on to create ads and brand messaging for brand awareness. “We created our own metrics to analyse if a communication is working or not and we try to measure the lift that we get by running an ad. It is an easy-to-understand approach because we are mature enough to understand that not all advertising will give us a similar lift. We then got Akshay Kumar in our ads who talked about the importance of insurance and not Policybazaar as a brand.”

According to Singh, there are two moments of truth in marketing - one is when the consumer selects the product and so brands do whatever they can to make them select their product, and the second is when they use that product. “In insurance, we are a ‘pay now, hopefully never use later’ product and it creates a unique dynamic in a low-trust society. We understood that we have to address the second moment of truth head-on.”

Concluding his session with Policybazaar’s marketing journey of brand vision and business growth so far, Singh said: “Right from the beginning up until now, we are focused on building awareness. The idea is to bend the rules and not break them, and hence we have bent them according to the consumers’ insights. The most important thing is to understand what consumers do vs what they are saying. We are moving from transaction to trust and that is the journey we are on. It is still a long way to go but we have definitely made some progress.”