A good marketer needs to find balance between emotional and functional message, says Tata Capital's Abonty Banerjee

In a bid to get their message across, most brands these days try to bombard consumers with emotional messages. But according to Abonty Banerjee, Chief Marketing and Digital Officer, Tata Capital, the balance between functional and emotional messaging is extremely important for a brand.

Though Tata Capital has also taken the emotional route in its recent campaigns, Banerjee says getting the balance right in the communication strategy is the key to gain reliability.

“In the financial sector, if there are product features and functionalities to be explained to an audience, then you do take a functional route. Today, digital and social media is quite amenable to doing that, as is email and SMS communication. A good marketer needs to find a balance of both emotional and functional message. It should be completely led by your advertising goal,” Banerjee said.

Considering how information-heavy the sector is, a BFSI brand taking the functional route in the advertisement can be overwhelming for the consumer. Speaking more about the differentiated approach to be taken by the BFSI brands, Banerjee said, “While the BFSI sector is information-heavy, it’s advantageous for the brand because finance is something very close to the customer’s heart. You will find that people are very receptive because they want to learn everything. If you take soap, they don’t pay very close attention to what’s there on the packaging, but if you look at a financial product, the consumers are far more receptive, they want to grasp everything at that moment. While the financial product is functional and information-heavy, if you look at the customer need, that is very emotional; loans are about buying a house, buying a vehicle, starting a business, so, finance is a means to do all of this, which is an advantage,” said Banerjee.

One of the most awarded campaigns of 2017 was ‘Salaam Loans’ launched by Tata Capital. Even that was a mix of emotional and functional messaging. The brand had also launched a campaign titled Do Right. With these campaigns and its services, it aims to enhance trust and customer experience.

On a different note, Tata Capital is using artificial intelligence quite heavily in an attempt to improve customer experience in the entire purchase cycle by using bots.

Banerjee said, “In the service sector, the use of AI is evolved in searching, filling the forms, and many other processes. So, it is gaining momentum and is used in the backend where bots are used for operations and processing. At every point now, AI is being used whether you look at prospecting or hunting for potential customers. AI is used to build a propensity marketing model. In the entire customer purchasing process, AI is used in the form of bots, helping consumers to fill a form. Natural language processing and voice-based AI is coming in. Email management has moved to bots. A few models are still at a nascent stage whereas a few such as risk and collection model has been used a lot.”

Keeping the consumer trust intact is one of the challenging tasks that every brand in the banking and financial sector faces. However, Banerjee expressed confidence that trust has never been a hurdle for Tata Capital.

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