Too little

From Business Standard article Not really. Sometimes that is just what the customer wants.

Unfortunately, it is all too common: dreams and aspirations move to the back seat when confronted by the urgency of meeting day-to-day needs and other, more practical priorities.

But Fullerton India Credit takes the contrarian view and says it doesn’t have to be like this. The new non-banking finance company made that clear with its first ad campaign a few weeks ago.

Launched in phases — in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh from the second week of June and up north a fortnight ago — the two television commercials show families satisfied that their small wishes have been fulfilled. One film has a young child going to bed smiling in anticipation of a summer holiday in Delhi — earlier he was dreading having to lie to his friends when school reopened.

Another shows a teenager looking up with pride at his father’s newly spruced-up shop — he had been ashamed of the earlier, run-down kirana store. The message is clear: financial assistance from Fullerton made these dreams possible. The tagline underlines that: Humse kariye dil ki baat (Tell us what’s in your heart).

Formally launched in January 2006, Fullerton is a subsidiary of Asia Financial Holdings, which in turn is a subsidiary of Singapore’s Temasek Holdings. It lends to individuals and businesses from the middle- and lower-income groups — a section that the company believes has not been catered to sufficiently by other financial institutions.

Of course, there’s a good reason for that: very often, such people don’t have the credentials banks and financial institutions need to sanction loans. They lack proper documentation and proof, can’t offer suitable collateral and don’t really come under the radar all that often.

Fullerton is trying to reach out to this group through a relationship-led and community-based model. It focuses only on customers within a 5 km-radius of its branches; relationship managers make house calls and speak with potential customers about their financial requirements.

Going by the company’s expansion, the model seems to be working: from 25 pilot branches, Fullerton now has 275 offices in 18 states. The growth explains the strategy behind launching the campaign now: the time was right. “We have reached a mass where we need to build the brand,” says G S Sundararajan, CEO and MD, Fullerton.

The theme of the campaign was decided after careful, qualitative research a couple of months before the account was handed to Ogilvy & Mather, Fullerton’s agency since the start of operations.

The findings weren’t surprising: among the lower and middle income groups, financial security and future planning take precedence over “frivolous” pursuits.

Which means investing in pension plans and your child’s education is higher priority than revamping the store or going on holiday. The message Fullerton wanted to convey was easily decided, therefore: with a little help from us, you can do both.

Armed with the findings and timeliness of reaching out to people after a successful stint in business, the company launched its brand-building exercise with a press campaign in March, followed by radio spots in 15 cities in April.

The TVC was broadcast first in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh — Fullerton has 90 branches in the two states. Naturally, then, spots on regional language channels such as Sun TV, Eenadu and Raj TV were priority, but the campaign is also on air on mass channels such as Zee, Sahara and Sony.

Shot in Mumbai, the 60-second films — with 45- and 30-second edits — aided in breaking away from the short-and-quirky-ads clutter and were a blatant play on emotions.

“But that was essential,” explains Anup Chitnis, group creative director, Ogilvy & Mather, Mumbai, “We are talking to a section of people who do not have a very good understanding of finance. For them it is about their dreams being fulfilled.”

Interestingly, the same team at O&M had been responsible for State Bank of India’s “Surprisingly SBI” campaign — a completely different approach using humour to target younger people.

With a marketing and advertising budget of Rs 14 crore, the campaign will now continue with fresh radio spots in the coming weeks as well as extensive below-the-line initiatives such as banners, billboards and posters, strategically near the branches.

Print ads, though, will be limited and appear only in vernacular newspapers. Both the company and the agency claim that initial reaction to the campaign has been heart-warming.

The general impression of Fullerton’s target customers is that they slip through the gaps in mainstream institutional lending — they aren’t the poorest of the poor who qualify for microlending initiatives, nor are they the regular, income-tax paying professional who is the focus of most banks’ personal lending programmes.

They are the small traders who run the store with their brothers, the junior employees who are paid salaries that are exempt from income tax, or the first-generation entrepreneur who doesn’t maintain his account books religiously.

It was important, therefore, to keep the message simple — and emotional. “That’s how it works. Our branch employees belong to the same region and culture as the people to whom they lend,” says Sundararajan.

This homogeneity, Fullerton claims, makes it easier to assess the loan seeker; of course, there are the usual risk-assessment exercises as well.

Loans are disbursed under two schemes. “Parivaar” caters to the salaried class and includes products such as unsecured product loans, secured loans, home finance and home equity.

“Vyapaar” focuses on small businessmen, entrepreneurs and traders with a turnover of under Rs 2 crore. Fullerton offers loans of Rs 10,000 to Rs 1 lakh, at interest rates of 1.5-3 per cent a month. The company also sells third-party insurance and has plans to launch its own mutual funds products.

With a loan portfolio of Rs 1,500 crore and plans to more than double that by end-2007, Fullerton is also aiming for 1,200 branches in the next 12 months. But what about competition from the unorganised market and giants such as GE Money, Citifinancial and HSBC Pragati? After all, they have been in the market far longer. “I am sure they are doing well,” says Sundararajan.

“But the market is large enough to accommodate us extremely comfortably.” He points out that dipstick surveys among the target audience shows that although people know about these rival companies, they have little knowledge about their offerings and products.

Then, Sundararajan adds that Fullerton has an edge: physical proximity to the customer, compared to the others who concentrate more on the metros. That also helps in keeping the heart-to-heart chats going.