Brand & Product PULL are our real strengths!
Says Shikha Sharma, the Managing Director & CEO, ICICI Prudential Life or ICICI Pru who realized very early that brand building was critical to enhance the customer experience. The “Jeete Raho” campaign struck the chord with customer and ICICI Pru’s products became a household name.
Being in the retail lending business, Ms. Sharma knew besides having a strong brand, service aspect is also important backed by product innovation and deep distribution penetration. Working on these levers, ICICI Pru today is vanguard of private insurance industry. Indeed it has come a long way since its inception in December 2000. Today it is India’s leading private life insurer, offering a complete range of products to meet the varying needs of the Indian customer.
Shikha Sharma began her career with ICICI, one of India's largest financial service providers, in 1980. She has been instrumental in setting up various group businesses for the company, including investment banking and retail finance.
She holds Masters of Business Administration from the Indian Institute of Management - Ahmedabad.
Ms. Sharma spoke to Harsh Roongta and Bienu Vaghela of ApnaInsurance in a candid Q & A session.
We present here the excerpts:
Being at the helm of largest private insurer – ICICI Pru Life, please tell us which factors can be attributed to tremendous growth of the life insurance industry in terms of growth, coverage and revenue etc.?
In the business of insurance, the foremost thing, which a consumer looks upto, is the brand, followed by the product, which is functionally relevant to him. As the nature of business is retail, service plays an important role. We focused on these factors to achieve this kind of growth. Moreover, we strengthened our ‘reach’ too. The other differentiating factor was our ‘advertising’, which touched the customer’s heart. We realized very early that brand building was critical.
Indeed ICICI brand was well- known, so to extend it into insurance and make consumer understand that now that trusted brand like ICICI is going to give them insurance, was another important factor. We chose not to go for high allocation charge products (you may recollect controversy of differed allocation charge structure by
some competitors). The products were designed keeping the customer in the mind so the category and price points were relevant to them. Being early product innovators, we were the first company to come up with different products.
How is product innovation important from customer’s perspective?
Of course, it is important! This is the latent need of the consumer. The customer comes to know of the feature in the product, which is relevant to him. Talking of ULIPs here, ULIPs empowered customers by giving them much needed flexibility so we got those hooks right. We understood what is meant what for the consumer, which we were able to communicate to the consumer so that he could utilize the power of that product. At the same time, there were special features (like retirement planning or children’s education) in the product backed by emotional appeal of the brand. Therefore, it was the complete platform. As we were the first ones to start it, we got the instant mind recall.
Competitors feel that real catalysts in the success story were distribution network, besides high commission structure. What do you have to say on that?
Distribution is ICICI Pru’s strength. Yes, we focused on it, and made it happen. We had multichannel distribution; which involved banks, corporate agents and individual agents. However, to say that we did well due to high commission structure is highly unfair. Let me share with you that our charge structures are lowest. If our expense ratio is lowest then how can we be highest commission payers? Have a look at our balance sheets and you know that we are actually lowest among the industry. The real strength lies in product pull and the brand pull.