Fintech NBFC Eduvanz enters B2C realm with WiZR; launches 4 ad films

Being in the business of lending to learners, Eduvanz, an NBFC company, which scaled for more than six years now, has entered the B2C realm with WiZR.

In the world where ‘upskill’ has become a new buzzword, WiZR, a comprehensive aggregator platform for adult learners, aims to make the world ‘more productive’ by enabling every individual to learn and grow, as per Loveleen Sahrawat, Chief Marketing Officer, Eduvanz.

In a freewheeling conversation with BestMediaInfo.com, she highlighted that the primary reason behind the launch of WiZR was rooted in the fact that Eduvanz, being in the business of lending to learners, couldn’t intervene even if it found out that the candidate wasn’t selecting the right course for themselves.

The other reason, in her viewpoint, was that because Eduvanz was a player in the B2B2C segment, it was restricted in scaling up as it was dependent on the scaling up of the institute.

“What we wanted to do is build an ecosystem which allowed for three important things. The first one is to help individuals understand whether or not there is a need to upskill, and if at all there is which level (beginner, intermediate and advanced) should he/she upskill for and what are the right courses for the same. Once the individual has an understanding of these three factors, we offer them a personalised recommendation, help them compare various institutes in our marketplace and enable no-cost EMI for the same,” she said.

Elaborating on WiZR’s target cohorts and the problem it helps in solving for learners in today’s day and age, she stated that standing tall on four key pillars- Discover, Learn, Finance, and Grow, the aggregator platform is currently targeting three cohorts of adult learners and helping them analyse, assess and enroll for 158 skills across 19 domains.

“While the first cohort comprises students enrolled in standard 10-12, the second and the third cohort comprise first-time jobbers or working professionals, and Human Resources and Learning and Development communities in corporates, respectively,” she said.

Furthermore, Sahrawat also opined that via WiZR, learners can take a skill assessment test and basis that find out the right career path for them and working professionals or early jobbers can assess their current skillset and accordingly find the right areas to upskill themselves.

Similarly, for the third cohort- HR and L&D professionals in corporates, WiZR aids in assessing a prospective candidate’s psychometrics like their personality, traits, aptitude and skills, leading up to recruitment and also helps in upskilling the current workforce to improve both performance and retention scores, she added.

While Eduvanz already helps learners in financing their education, on WiZR, individuals will also be able to avail the benefit of credit line as it is soon going to be live on the platform, positively by May.

That being said, the platform went live in late October, last year, and is now promoting itself via its brand campaign comprising four digital films on various digital platforms including Meta and Google. The same went live on January 20 and is going to be live for 45 days, i.e.- tentatively till the second week of March.

Delving into the ideation journey of the brand campaign, Sahrawat opined that the primary idea of the campaign is rooted in making people understand the concept of upskilling and why is it so important in modern times.

“Two of our films, Aam and Khargosh, build on the fact that if you continuously upskill yourself, you'll do so much better in your career. Similarly, the Chamcha film challenges the traditional approach of growing in the corporate world, i.e- having to succumb to sucking up, and highlights how one can move up the ladder by strengthening one’s own skill set. The Googl-y film, on the other hand, highlights that one needn’t go crazy trying to figure out a place to compare institutes before making the right choice because WiZR is the ultimate destination,” she elaborated.

WiZR’s Aam film-

WiZR’s Rabbit film-

WiZR’s Chamcha film-

WiZR’s Googl-y film-

Upon being questioned on why digital is the only media vehicle being leveraged for the campaign, she replied that this is because learners are primarily skewed on digital and in its first year, WiZR wants to listen to the customers’ voice and feedback and work accordingly.

“The idea is to stick to digital-only media planning and go direct to consumer through B2B tie-ups in the first year and go mass or evaluate advertising on impact properties in 2025,” she said.

That being said, the brand campaign conceptualised and executed by WiZR’s in-house team is targeting the first top 25 cities on Meta and the top 10 cities on YouTube across two cohorts- 18-24 years of age and 25-44 years of age, according to Sahrawat.

“Because we have both agility and a deep understanding of the brand, I don't see a role for ad agencies in the short term even though they will always be a part of the work that we do, especially in the future when we will want the best talent to start shaping our brand equity. But even then, it’d be for specific projects because I believe that we already have a very nimble and agile creative team in-house and being a startup, we have an extremely tech-savvy, creative and relaxed atmosphere where most of the creative people can fit in very easily,” she said.

With this, she also added that since the agency model is getting hugely disrupted and influencers are getting into the marketing model in such a big way, the agencies themselves will go through a change in the short term.

“Until that happens, we will wait for the dust to settle and see what kind of a model emerges from there, before we see what relationship we want with the agencies in the long term,” she added.

Sharing her insights on the nomenclature of the platform as WiZR, Sahrawat stated that since some of the best and the most visually powerful brands have four alphabets in them, she was very keen on having a four-letter brand name and therefore what ticked for her was the name WiZR.

“And because we believe that learners are for life and with every day we grow wiser.  In fact, we’re probably one of the very few brands, if not the only brand in the country right now, which has a moving logo. That being said, the constantly changing W in WiZR represents the various individuals who will come and sit on our platform and because each individual is unique, we will provide them a completely personalised journey on the platform albeit via recommendation, experience, etc. Similarly, the R in our brand name represents the continuous learning that we stand for as a brand,” she opined.

Throwing light on the pastle-y background, both on the platform interface and in their brand campaign, the CMO pointed out that because WiZR aims to make learning aspirational, non-taxing, and not anxiety-driven, the UI/UX of the platform is built such that it is very intuitive, user-friendly and really global-looking. WiZR is one of the first platforms to be integrated end-to-end integrated from Discover, Learn, Finance to Grow.

“The brand WiZR has been built with a little bit of classicness and forever contemporary touch to it. On our platform, we have used neon colours for they represent the youngest generation since always and green for it signals an always-on process. The two combined in a fluorescent highlighter is often used to highlight words that one’s learning, because we believe that people who learn stay young forever. On the other hand, we’ve used the charcoal black and eggshell white colours to represent the very classic and traditional elements- blackboard and chalk,” she stated.

It was in lieu of making the process of learning feel easy and relaxing that WiZR used fonts such as Quintus for handwriting and Patron as the primary brand font. This was done to break the formality of the website into something which is easy, informal and worth noting. It also makes the platform look more contemporary and easy on the eye whilst instilling a sense of productivity.

“Since we’re a young company, we also wanted to ensure that the website looks interesting and helps consumers forget their anxiety when they interact on the same. Hence, we have resorted to a lot of 3d animations and in doing so, kept the animation language very lateral rather than direct,” she added.

During the conversation, Sahrawat also mentioned that mis-selling, mainly prevalent in the financial services industry, has over time percolated down to the edtech segment. To address this issue, WiZR resorts to an extensive publishing of whether or not the listed and recommended institute, be it in India or across the globe, provide for a slew of factors such as job placements, scholarships, mentors, curriculum, expected salary, etc. The goal is to eliminate any possibility of false information being passed on to the consumer.

“It is due to this very reason that none of our ads talk about job guarantees or other promises and have no hyperbole because we want to always sit on the customer's side,” she said.

Lastly, she also highlighted that as of now, there are over 350 institutes enlisted on WiZR’s Website and that the same will cross the 500 institute benchmark by April 2024. Similarly, the number of courses available on the aggregator platform, amounting to Rs 1000- 1000000, will also go up from 4000 to 10000 in the same duration.

“In the next six months, WiZR will bring to its platform, the option for consumers to give ratings on courses. While the website is already up and running with a few lakh engagements already, we will also be launching the WiZR app soon, positively in the next few months,” she said.

Info@BestMediaInfo.com