SBI YONO: Say YO to Life

Printed from WARC

8 min read
Nilesh Fatnaney, Navonil Chatterjee

The WARC Prize for Asian Strategy, Entrant, 2020

SUMMARY
State Bank of India, a 200-year-old bank, leveraged the genuine usefulness of its utility app to
connect with a millennial audience in India.
SBI was seen as the bank of yesteryear and was struggling for relevance with the millenials who were
set to become the primary customers and investors of the near future.

The brand recognised the popularity of utility apps and developed the insight for its YONO banking
app that useful is the new youthful.

App awareness and downloads were driven through the 'you don't know?' TVC and radio which
played on the target's FOMO, and the campaign was extended with a shopping festival, the YONO 20
Under Twenty Awards and in uencer marketing.

Downloads, registrations and usage metrics exceeded objectives, as did pre-approved personal
loans, while SBI's share of the Indian digital banking market grew to 30%.

VIDEOS
Read this article on warc.com to view the video

Campaign Video: SBI YONO: Say YO to Life

Campaign details

Brand: SBI YONO

Brand owner: SBI (State Bank Of India)
Lead agency: Redi usion Brand Solutions Pvt. Ltd.
Contributing agencies: BuzzOka, Crayons Advertising, Network
Advertising, Seventy Event Media Group
Market: India
Industries: Banks
Media channels: Events & experiential, Mobile & apps, Newspapers,
Public relations, Radio & audio, Sales promotion, Social media, Television
Budget: 1 - 3 million

Executive summary
State Bank of India (SBI), a 200-year-old bank, was struggling to connect
with Indian millennials who constituted 47% of India's working
population and were set to be the primary contributors to economic
growth in the following ve years. For SBI, not recruiting them clearly
meant risking the bank's future growth and pro tability.

The goal therefore was to bring this generation of tomorrow to the bank of
yesterday. This goal was divided into sub-goals of downloads, registrations,
daily active users, and more, to gauge real world impact of our strategic
thinking. Unlike other brands that used formulaic approaches like getting
youth endorsers, or leveraging worthy causes without committing to them
(known as woke washing), we delved deeper into the lives of Indian
millennials to discover that utility is the new cool. This led us to our
insight – useful is the new youthful.

This insight sparked our big idea – not just a banking app but an app you
can bank upon – which was brought to life through an integrated
campaign demonstrating the utility of our app YONO in the context of a
millennial's everyday life. This allowed SBI to not only connect with
Indian millennials but also capture 30% share of India's digital banking
market.

Market background and cultural context

How an Indian behemoth earned its stripes

SBI was an Indian multinational, public sector banking and nancial

services statutory body. Ranked 236th in the Fortune Global 500 list of the
world's biggest corporations of 2019, it was the largest bank in India with a
23% market share in assets, and 25% share of the total loan and deposits
market. (Source: Fortune Global 500 List, Economic Times – A Financial Daily)
And this behemoth was struggling to connect with Indian millennials, a
segment which constituted 47% of India's working population who were
set to be primary contributors to economic growth whether as consumers,
entrepreneurs or investors in the coming ve years. (Source: Business
Standard, September 2018)

The enormity of the challenge could be appreciated from the fact that the
mere utterance of the words SBI conjured up a black and white image of a
dusty old branch, overcrowded with customers jostling with each other to
get their work done. It reminded people of a place where they had to
physically ll out reams of forms and submit them by joining serpentine
queues just to get things moving. With such perceptions it was de nitely
going to be di cult to get millennials to adopt brand SBI. To make things
more challenging, team SBI had already attempted this once when they
launched YONO in November 2017, but by their own admission the results
post launch were at best lukewarm.

While team SBI had gone all out by seamlessly integrating regular banking
activities with additional lifestyle services like shopping (Amazon,
Myntra), commute (Uber), travel (Yatra, RedBus, IRCTC, OYO), food
(Zomato) and many more into the YONO app, its earlier attempts to
connect with millennials had failed as the target perceived SBI to be
yesteryear's bank, one which they didn't want to interact with.

Our challenge: how do we bring the generation of tomorrow to the bank of

yesterday?

Objectives

We decided to venture where only eagles dare

Call us courageous or foolish but unlike most marketers, who were happy
tracking soft metrics like awareness and consideration, we made the
audacious choice of tracking hard metrics like downloads and usage.
These would not only indicate but also con rm that our e orts had real
business impact.

YONO KPIs and target scores

Insight and strategic thinking

Peeling the onion, uncovering deeper meanings

Instead of using a formulaic approach like getting a youth icon to endorse

our brand or leveraging a worthy cause without committing to it (referred
to as woke washing), we decided to take a closer look at millennials and
the apps they interacted with every day. Using an app audit amongst
millennial employees within our agency we came across the usual suspects
– Uber, Swiggy, Net ix, Tinder, Splitwise, MakeMyTrip, AirBnB and
others.
We pondered what made these apps so cool. Why did our millennial
employees make them a part of their everyday lives? How did these apps
contribute to their daily lives? Through repeated cycles of pondering and
questioning we managed to slowly peel away layers of the onion and
uncover our insight. These apps were not there for mere aunt value alone,
each app served a speci c purpose. Need entertainment – Net ix. Need
food – Swiggy. Need a ride – Uber. And so on. Each app fundamentally
existed to get a particular job done, they were there because of their utility
and so our insight was that utility was the new cool. Useful is the new
youthful.

The discovery of a sharp insight – useful is the new youthful – triggered an

outburst of creativity. It sparked multiple ideas and after multiple rounds
of discussions and deliberations we narrowed down to one which we felt
had the potential of becoming a big idea and could travel across channels
seamlessly.

The big idea: not just a banking app but an app you can bank upon.

Creative and/or channel execution

The big idea was brought to life through a series of interventions each
aimed at moving our consumer along the various stages of the funnel.

To build awareness and drive downloads, we began with a light-hearted

TVC. It playfully tugged at our target's FOMO by repeatedly asking them
"you don't know?" Using this narrative, we smartly conveyed the various
experiences which could be mediated through our app and how they made
life better. An adaptation of our narrative also aired on radio to
complement our e orts on TV.
Now that we had su cient awareness and downloads, we focused on
getting consumers to use our app regularly. To this end, we launched the
biggest shopping festival that challenged the likes of Amazon's 'Great
Indian Festival' and Flipkart's 'Big Billion Day Sale'. A rst of its kind
experience, it provided o ers and deals across platforms ranging from
Amazon to Zomato, Yatra and Uber, all in one place. It was India's biggest
shopping festival uniting most consumer platforms during its ve-day sale.
Not only did it catalyse app downloads, it also boosted the number of
transactions.

While our properties 'you don't know' and YONO Shopping Festival
helped create awareness, downloads and usage for our app, these
properties were sadly time bound. We needed a property that would not
only engage with millennials but also become a representation of their
spirit. With this in mind we constituted and launched the rst edition of
YONO 20 Under Twenty awards to recognise achievers under 20 years. We
received 60 nominations across 10 categories, from which 20 were
shortlisted by eight eminent personalities including actor Dia Mirza,
sports journalist and author Boria Majumdar, Sashi Sreedharan (MD,
Microsoft India), Dilip Asbe (MD and CEO, NPCI), and Mallika Dua,
social media in uencer. With this, YONO became an embodiment of
Indian youth – smart, tech savvy, quick and adaptable.

To promote the YONO 20 Under Twenty Awards, SBI turned to in uencer

marketing. It deployed India's biggest in uencer marketing campaign
leveraging over 2000 in uencers and users across TikTok, Facebook,
Twitter and Instagram. Four in uencers covered our event live for their
followers to get a sense of both the event and what YONO was all about.

It was interesting to note that the campaign was nothing like what SBI had
ever done before. From the conventional plan of TV, print, radio and out
of home, SBI refreshed itself with a digital and experiential campaign
which was something even consumers didn't expect from SBI.

Performance against objectives

We measured our results post campaign as well as 12 months later to get a

true sense of our campaign's impact.

Objective 1, app downloads: grow by 70% and achieve 200 lakh

downloads by March 2019.

Result: overachieved our target and grew by 91% with 225 lakh
downloads. By September 2019, we had grown 2.5 times to
cumulatively reach 300 lakh downloads.
Objective 2, registrations: grow by 50%, reach 34.85 lakh
registrations by March 2019.

Result: overshot our target and grew by 216% with registrations of

73.49 lakh by September 2019, we grew 5.6 times to 130 lakh total
registered users overall.
Objective 3, accounts opened: grow by 50%, get account base to
11.85 lakh by March 2019.

Result: achieved three times our target by scaling account base to

27.53 lakh users. By September 2019, we had over 50 lakh users, 6.3
times our base the previous year.
 Objective 4, usage: improve by 30%, get 3.02 lakh daily log-ins by
March 2019.

Result: exceeded expectations by achieving 331% growth, 10 lakh

daily log-ins. By September 2019, reached 39 lakh daily active users,
16.8 times the previous year's numbers.

Objective 5, pre-approved personal loans (PAPL) disbursed:

by March 2019, grow PAPL book size to INR650 crores, a 30%
improvement.

Result: grew PAPL by 660% in six months. By September 2019, it

had soared 17 times to INR8,500 crores.

By the end of the campaign, State Bank of India had managed to capture
30% share of the Indian digital banking market. Yes, State Bank of India,
yesterday's bank, rose to own almost a third of the digital banking space in
India.

(Source: Client Data – YONO Performance Reports. Similar Web)

Lessons learned

Leave the sizzle behind because it's sausage time

The rules of brand building were changing. We were building brands in the
digital age where availability of information allowed consumers to focus on
the more rational and real aspects of the product (the sausage in barbecue
parlance), instead of getting swayed away by emotional brand narratives
(the sizzle enveloping our aforementioned sausage). In our case, we were
fortunate enough to discover that millennials made only certain apps a
part of their everyday lives because each app served a speci c purpose.
Those apps fundamentally existed in their life to get a job done. It was
their utility or usefulness which made them cool amongst millennials,
leading us to articulating our insight as 'useful is the new youthful'.

Thankfully, by seamlessly integrating regular banking activities with

additional lifestyle services like shopping (Amazon, Myntra), commute
(Uber), travel (Yatra, RedBus, IRCTC, OYO), food (Zomato) and many
more into the YONO app our brand SBI YONO was adding function to
function instead of adding emotion to function. We were able to leverage
this usefulness of our app to demonstrate how it worked better than others
to our audience and gain 30% share of the Indian digital banking market.

We are in no way saying that emotional narratives could not be e ective,

but it may have been the right time for brands to explore if they could get
better traction by focusing more on their tangible product o ering instead
of leveraging intangible emotional values.

Zig when the others are zagging

In India, every other brand was trying to woo millennials by using
formulaic approaches like getting a youth icon to endorse its brand or
were leveraging causes relevant to their consumers but without committing
to those causes fully (referred to as woke washing). It would have been easy
for us to leverage one or the other approach for our brand, but had we
gone down either path we would have ended up creating yet another me-
too brand which would have been lost in the sea of sameness created by
many others before it. We took a conscious call to stay away from
leveraging either a youth icon or resort to woke washing and instead
focused on using the time-tested method of building our brand on the
bedrock of a powerful insight. Although relatively di cult and more
taxing, choosing this path which was less taken truly made all the
di erence for our brand.

Client's view

"The insight 'useful is the new youthful' helped us connect with Indian millennial
consumers and encourage them to not only try but also regularly use our YONO
app."

– Ms. Sweta Aggarwall, CMO, State Bank of India.

TOPICS
BANKS (http://www.warc.com.ie.idm.oclc.org//search/Financial-services/Banks)
INDIA (http://www.warc.com.ie.idm.oclc.org//search/Asia/India)

© Copyright Ascential Events (Europe) Limited 2020

Ascential Events (Europe) Limited
Americas: 229 West 43rd Street, 7th Floor, New York, NY 10036, United States - Tel: +1 212 201 2800
APAC: OUE Downtown 1, #44-03, 6 Shenton Way, 068809, Singapore - Tel: +65 3157 6200
EMEA: 33 Kingsway, London, WC2B 6UF, United Kingdom - Tel: +44 (0)20 7467 8100
www.warc.com (https://www-warc-com.ie.idm.oclc.org)

All rights reserved including database rights. This electronic le is for the personal use of authorised users based at the
subscribing company's o ce location. It may not be reproduced, posted on intranets, extranets or the internet, e-
mailed, archived or shared electronically either within the purchaser's organisation or externally without express written
permission from WARC.