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| Edited By: Collin Furtado |Source: DNA |Updated: Mar 23, 2018, 04:02 AM IST
While people gift flowers, candy, cards, among other things, Aviva Life Insurance has created a product for couples this Valentine's Day that reaches their heart. The company launched the 'Aviva Heart Care' campaign which highlights their product which takes care of the couples hearts from heart conditions with one policy.
Anjali Malhotra, chief customer, marketing and digital officer at Aviva India spoke to Collin Furtado on the new product they launched during Valentine's Day for couples and how it could help them where other insurance policies can't. Apart from that, she spoke on the campaign, the IRDAI norms, competition in the insurance sector and demonetization.
This is the first time we are giving an opportunity for BFSI guys to talk about something on Valentine's Day which typically is with matters of the heart. India is the cardio vascular capital of the world and there is nothing dedicated to heart care from an insurance standpoint. So, clearly there was a gap. Most people believe if they have a medical policy they are in good hands. However, the truth is far from that as when people are struck by a critical illness like a heart attack, you realise there is a capping on sum assured. The average sum assured is Rs 3 lakhs, which is insufficient. There was an other insight that many of the patents that come into hospitals are ill-prepared and that a large portion of the costs are not payed by insurers. Clearly that presented a huge challenge. As Indians, we are more prone to heart conditions because we are genetically pre-disposed to it. People have voiced out in our research that we feel venerable and that is why we decided a year back that we should look at the space. We are trying to make products that are more responsive to today's consumer needs.
The product essentially is a heart care plan which is fixed payout policy. Here, if you have a heart condition, you get a fixed lump-sum amount depending on the sum assured that you have gone for. Obviously, it is not linked to hospitalisation costs and is for whatever over and above mediclaim that you may have. This means you don't have to show proof of what expenses had incurred. Therefore, it helps you for your treatment and over and above the treatment you can use it if there is loss of income. If you want to sit at home and recuperate, then the money comes in handy. You can even take multiple claims within the sum assured.
The best part of the policy is that this is for two hearts. Why we did this is because both the couples live are important for the family. If you look at term insurance, men are more covered than women because there is more financial dependency on the men. But when it comes to the heart, we felt that both the hearts were equally important. So we created an opportunity to ensure the two hearts. There is a 'Me' plan for one heart and the 'We' plan for two hearts.
We are running this campaign under our brand philosophy of good thinking. We believe good thinking is about creating healthy India in this context and from a larger sense our commitment to our customers lives. Under this, we have launched the 'Healthy Heart Campaign' which is about "two hearts one plan". We have launched 3 TV films for the campaign. We did some work with Dr. Chauhan from Vedanta Hospitals on social media. We have also done a lot of customer contact programmes in malls where we got people to workout on treadmills, etc. to see if their heart is healthy. We gamified some of the activities in these malls. Through this we could suggest to some of the people whether they require to go in for a product like this or not. People should start working on healthy heart habits early in life. From a Valentine's Day perspective, we targeted our message as two hearts is the best thing to give your spouse this valentine's day.
Is the premium on the insurance plan flexible according to how a person maintains their health?In life insurance, nobody has done that as there are certain IRDAI norms on the same are restrictive. I do believe some general insurance players have done that. But if it can be implemented, it would be good as the more closer you get to consumers lifestyles, the better it is. There is a lot of distance to be covered in terms of creating newer propositions.
The regulatory is also learning and evolving as we speak and all of us as constituents in this industry are working towards helping the regulator do that. The regulator's chief interest is the customer and that their interest are best covered. But in some ways, it needs to cover a lot of distance in terms of consumption of insurance. We are a very complex buy and we need to simplify ourselves in order for consumers to digitally purchase us. So there is something where we as an industry have to do a lot of work.
I would refrain from putting on a number on it. Suffice to say that we have a decent frequency where the target audience for us we will ensure that there is some OTS frequency to come, which is the measure we are look at. The brand has spent money after a very long time, so we have tried to do justice to our consumers.
There is certainly no visible impact. If at all, it will only be positive as more declared income means, more saving opportunities and thereby more investment in all asset classes.
It is both an opportunity as well as a challenge. Insurance has only a 2.6% penetration in the country, which itself is a huge opportunity. But the challenge really is that there are 24 players and there is a lack of differentiation. It being so heavily regulated, the products end up being fairly me-to in nature. The challenge is how do we differentiate. At Aviva, our approach is about good thinking. It is about understanding our target segment and how we can add benefits to their lives which are relevant to them. The heart care proposition is one of that, we have many more such propositions coming up.
