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Ajita Shashidhar

Cholamandalam MS General Insurance Company has tried to project itself as a crisis manager.

Arun Agarwal, Chief Executive

HE is a character that could be your neighbour or even your colleague — a person constantly curious to know what is happening in your life. And in case some misfortune or calamity hits you, he makes sure you re-live the pain by enquiring about how it all happened again and again!

Cholamandalam MS General Insurance Company, in its latest TV commercial, has tried to convey the importance of insuring oneself against eventualities such as an accident or even a sudden appendix operation on a business trip, through its character Chabilal — who is a `continuous enquirer', a character who is not exactly evil but derives pleasure by needling people. But here, Chabilal is in for a surprise as he tries to rekindle the miseries of the character Anand, who had to undergo such an operation during a business trip to Raipur. The commercial then goes on to show the various features of the Chola health insurance scheme that helped Anand manage everything, and finally comes the tagline, which says, `Jo bhi hoga, Chola manage karega!'

General insurance, says M. L. Raghavan, Client Services Director, JWT Chennai (the agency which handles the Chola account), is a low-involvement category, which hardly encourages people to invest as there are no returns. On the other hand, life insurance which promises guaranteed returns is more sought after.

"A person would rather put his money into `real' problems — child's education, escalating expenses, saving for the future and a whole host of other responsibilities. Responsibilities that feature way above general insurance in his priority list, refusing to let him part with money that would insure a not-so-probable eventuality. And that's precisely the way he

views general insurance — money set aside if a crisis hits. `If' because he may never need to make a claim — his appliances may never be affected by lightning, his son might never have his bicycle stolen, nor his wife her jewellery ... today's needs are far more pressing to him than tomorrow's Ifs," says Raghavan.

Therefore, the challenge clearly was to make general insurance as compelling a spend as life insurance. "We realised that a person is actually faced with quite a few common disruptions (and their financial implications) quite regularly. A suitcase that gets stolen from the train when he steps out to fill a bottle of water at the station, his wife slips in the bathroom and fractures her foot, a cell phone that gets wet, a holiday that gets cancelled and so on. All we needed to tell him is that general insurance is not about `unlikely eventualities' but about `common disruptions'... make the `If' disappear," he says.

"Putting these common situations alongside Chola's general insurance policies actually made us realise that Chola was a simple, effective and hassle-free way to better manage these common, beyond-one's-control disruptions. Out of this key insight was born unique communication that revolved around one simple hard-hitting thought — Jo bhi hoga, Chola manage karega," he adds.

And, instead of treading the usual path of showing films where the character regrets not having taken an insurance policy when calamity actually hits him, JWT, says Raghavan, opted to add a tinge of humour to the campaign through the character Chabilal, a person who knows how bad the situation is and yet wants to hear it from the victim again."

"Our communication brings out the power of insurance in action. General insurance can strike a chord with the common man only when it empowers the individual. What the customer needs is not just a product that offers compensation after a crisis, but a product that shoulders responsibilites along with him during crisis," says Arun Agarwal, Chief Executive, Cholamandalam MS General Insurance Company.

An emergency, according to Cholamandalam, is not necessarily a road accident or a heart attack. It claims to cover as many as 142 `day-care procedures,' which include problems such as sinus or even a minor fracture which doesn't require hospitalisation. "The company even reimburses the money lost in cancellation of a holiday, in case of eventualities like an accident," says Raghavan of JWT.

In fact, this campaign would be followed by a series of TVCs which focus on various aspects of the Chola insurance scheme. And, all of them would feature the ever-curious Chabilal who would always be stunned by the range of insurance offered by Cholamandalam.

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