Every industry and segment has seasonality and months when it peaks. For prickly heat powders it’s summers, for moisturisers it’s winters and for insurance and other tax saving products it seems to be January-February.
For the last few years, for a month or two before the budget / tax cycle there is heavy advertising by insurance providers. If they think that’s when consumers think about investing to save money, they are right. If they think that’s how they can build their brand, they are absolutely wrong.
Not only are they shouting that their product is just a tax saving proposition and not something more valuable but also unconsciously building ‘moment’ based buying behaviour in the category. At some point in future, they’ll all realise this folly and spend hard to break this exact ‘moment centricity’ they spent hard to build.
This year, the finance minister would have jolted them from slumber advancing the budget by a month or so. Thanks to this, I am sure a number of these ads had very little thinking and real consumer understanding going into them. Here are the ads for this year that I noticed this year…
