Igniting mass conversations around Union Budget 2017 with a counter-intuitive statement to launch Mahindra Mutual Fund's ELSS fund

Highly Cluttered Category

Mutual Funds in India is a highly cluttered and competitive category with over 45 mutual funds trying to get a share of the consumer pie with established AMC’s having the potential to scale their efforts. Mahindra Mutual Fund was the 46th entrant in the category offering schemes pan India, with special focus on semi-urban & rural markets.

Lack of differentiation

Kar Bachat Yojana, an ELSS fund was one of the key product offering, largely aimed at the salaried class across the country. All ELSS funds structurally are at parity due to mandates that dictate them. The core thematics of the offering i.e Save Taxes & Grow Wealth - are common points and over used by various tax-saving products while talking to same set of target audience making it a difficult task to be noticed and even more so to be considered.

Fight for SOV

JFM is the busiest month in context to competition pushing their ELSS funds as JFM is the time when many people suddenly wake up to the fact, that only a few weeks are left to either invest or buy an insurance cover to save money on tax for the current financial year. Thus gaining SOV for a new entrant in the domain a tall ask.

No budgets at Play

Mahindra Mutual Fund at its inception stage could not boast of a huge AUM at its inception stage. With SEBI mandating marketing budgets AUM size, the budget allocation was close to zero. This made it imperative for the effort to be entirely organic, making it a challenging task especially during the noisy JFM period.

Heavily regulated category

The creative canvas is limited in the category with SEBI governing the do’s and dont’s maintaining a thin line in terms of what can be said and what can’t in public communication.

Consumer Landscape

Indian salaried class has always detested the idea of taxes, eating away into their income. The general sentiment around taxes is a matter of huge debate drawing multiple views & opinions.

Channel Insight

Twitter as a platform is intrinsically driven by opinion and allows for sincere organic engagement given the right trigger

Leveraging a financial topical aperture to deliver a counter-intuitive statement that polarised opinion across the country - Taxes Acche Hain

Leveraging the negative sentiment

Tax is a topic that is usually rife with negative sentiment during the last financial quarter. Two days prior to the Union Budget announcement we delivered a bold statement on social platforms. Being a time when the nation's attention is focusing on potential implications of the budget on the individual and families, a counter-intuitive statement such as Taxes Acche Hain was bound to create conflicting opinions at a large scale.

Twitter Reacts & Provoke Key Influencer Participation

Triggering the conversation on Twitter made opinions fly fast and thick as the Twitterati jumped in either to attack or defend the statement.
This was further fuelled by the topical nature of the activity organically attracting financial influencers like Ajit Ranade, economist Nitin Pai, who got wondering if this was a government sponsored activity as a defensive mechanism to prop up the upcoming tax structure.

Users uplift the conversation to another level

The frenzy was further dialled up when some Twitter folks tagged the finance minister asking for an explanation. The Twitter drama headlined Zee Business, The Better India on the same day with exclusive articles featuring the speculation. The effort garnered a significant SOV and thereby significant upswing in terms of awareness, but did not stop at that.

Completing the picture

As the conversations erupted and came to a boil, the brand showcased unconventional thinking and switched the lens of ‘Taxes being a pain point to an opportunity’ - for cumulative growth and for personal wealth creation.

The brand completed the picture revealing Kar Bachat Yojana as the reason behind the statement. As an ELSS product Kar Bachat Yojana not just allowed people to grow their wealth while saving on taxes but gave an opportunity to enjoy tax-free returns. Then why not say - Taxes Acche Hain