Dezerv’s latest campaign puns on investors relying on shady sources for advice

Co-founder Sandeep Jethwani says that the need for expert advice has become more important in the current volatile market conditions.

If it’s hard to make money in today’s time, it’s even harder to use it efficiently. Especially when it comes to making the right investment decisions. The number of options available these days, makes it difficult for individuals to make the right investment decisions.

They may turn to financial influencers, Google, or rely on their gut feeling to invest their money. If they trust people who don’t have the requisite expertise, it may lead to loss of wealth.

Dezerv, a relatively new player in the invest-tech segment, has just launched its second campaign, titled #youdezervbetter. Conceptualized and created by the brand and its agency Light@27, the campaign is a witty take on how people tend to make rash investment decisions. The three ad films highlight the importance of consulting an expert before making investment decisions.

Speaking about the campaign, Sandeep Jethwani, co-founder, Dezerv, says that at the very inception of the platform, the team realised that India’s working professionals have money to invest, but don’t know how to go about it.

“Therefore, what they end up doing is that they either check on the web or look for people who are giving advice on social media platforms like YouTube and Instagram,” he adds.

This was just fine for a large part of last year, as market conditions were relatively positive and people were making money. But what the platform has witnessed recently is that this behaviour has started resulting in significant losses for the investors.

The campaign aims to help the platform’s users understand the importance of having an expert on their side in order to make right decisions about their money.

Currently, Dezerv is spending only on digital media, as most of its target audience is available there. For this campaign, Instagram and YouTube are the brand’s primary channels. The brand wanted to put this message across in a witty manner to break the clutter on social media and grab the attention of users.

Kshama Shetty, head of growth and marketing at Dezerv, informs that initially, the brand’s customer service representatives speak to the users before onboarding them to the platform.

“One of the key insights that stood out was that many people used to invest their money on an ad hoc basis. So, this is what we wanted to convey through the campaign, that users should not trust people that may randomly give advice to them,” adds Shetty.

For any upcoming digital-led platform, influencer marketing plays an important role in its marketing mix. Highlighting the role of influencers for Dezerv, Jethwani admits that a majority of them have done a great job in creating awareness about the financial aspects for users.

As per him, there is a lot of high quality content that is created about various things, like whether the users should have a credit or debit card or not, long-term investments, etc.

From Dezerv’s perspective, the category of influencers who create awareness about the importance of investing, are the ones that the brand associates with and will continue to work with. These influencers’ objective is to create more financial awareness and Dezerv’s objective is to emphasise on the importance of treating money with respect. These two objectives are in sync with each other and, hence, the brand will continue to work with such influencers, shares Jethwani.

The investment space is extremely cluttered and lately, to cater to the various investment needs, multiple platforms have come up. Be it platforms like Zerodha and Groww that aim to make investing seem easy, or the mushrooming cryptocurrency platforms like WazirX, CoinDCX and CoinSwitch Kuber that attract a lot of young users.

Jethwani mentions that the digital investment platforms can be divided into two major groups. “The first is DIY (do it yourself) platforms like Groww and Zerodha. These platforms have done a great job of making the investment process very simple. Users go to these platforms knowing what they want to invest in and these platforms facilitate that investment.”

The other part of the invest-tech landscape, Jethwani says, is where portfolios are created and recommended to the users by experts. Dezerv is a part of the second cohort.

“Within this, we don’t see stiff competition, as of now. Our primary competition currently is from bank relationship managers and the offline engagements that a user has,” says Jethwani.

If experts and reports are to be believed, the economy is likely to go into a recession. In such a scenario, how will people’s investment decisions be affected? Jethwani states, “In such an environment, the need for high quality advice or hand-holding becomes much more important. Users now are looking for experts to handhold them to steer through this volatile environment.”

Dezerv plans to scale its existing user base over the next few months. The platform will also be launching many expert solutions for both fixed income and high growth investments.

“We see our product suite expand in a big way over the next few months. From a marketing perspective, we react to topical events, and the needs of the users and their pain points as well. While we do all this, the brand, at its core, will always be an expert investing platform,” Jethwani mentions.