60% of our marketing budget goes to digital: CMO Kotak Mahindra Bank

Rohit Bhasin is a product of the CEO factory — Hindustan Unilever — where he spearheaded marketing for a variety of brands including Ponds, Glow and Lovely, Lifebuoy, Surf, Rin, etc. In 2023 Bhasin ended his almost 25-year association with Unilever to join Kotak Mahindra Bank. At Kotak Mahindra Bank Bhasin is president, head-affluent, NRI, business banking and chief marketing officer. 

Ahead of the festive season, Bhasin spoke to afaqs! about the banking brand’s approach to all things marketing. 

Edited excerpts: 

How is consumer behaviour in the personal care category different from the banking category?

Consumers hire you for a particular job that they want done. And if you do the job very well, they will hire you again. 

HUL relies on understanding the needs and aspirations of consumers; that is what products and propositions are built around. Banking as a category is more of a supply-side category. 

This means that instead of what the consumer wants, you should start with the product you already have and then find a consumer who can buy it. The culture that I am trying to implement here over the last year involves keeping the consumer at the heart of everything and then building the right products and propositions to meet those needs.

The number of purchase occasions is another big difference between the FMCG category and banking. You have to buy soap every month, so you have 12 purchase occasions in a year. Whereas, buying into a bank does not happen as often, and you don't change your bank account very easily.

Because consumers don’t change accounts like they do with soaps, it is also very difficult to make someone switch from their existing bank to your bank. 

How do you use AI to inform your marketing strategy these days?

 AI is essentially used in removing repetitive tasks, automating them, and reducing costs. But for me, the real use of AI lies in analysing data and predicting consumer behaviour. Based on predictions, we could create the right product propositions for the consumer, resulting in high business. 

We are building a very strong data stack and bucketing the organisation into the calculators and the consumers of data. The compute part of the organisation consists of data scientists who look at data and identify trends, and are able to build the right algorithms. The compute team can assist the credit card team in decision-making, such as should an application be approved or pre-emptively identify a user that might go delinquent. 

What’s your philosophy towards using technology to improve user experience online, given a decline in customer visits to physical branches these days? 

On one end, banks are increasing their physical footprint and establishing new branches. At the same time, we know that customers are reducing their frequency of visits to branches. So, we make sure we aid the consumer on both fronts.  

When it comes to digital, we look at how we can eliminate the need for the customer to come to the branch. We try to reduce the number of steps needed to complete a task. We identify the pain points of the consumer and remove those pain points in that journey so that the journey is faster, easier and more intuitive. 

Do you feel there is a large skew in spending to achieve short-term goals over the long-term?

You have to do both. Performance marketing is like water in the ocean. When you start performance marketing, it is not too expensive, because there is a lot of water in the ocean, and you can keep drawing water from the ocean. But if you do not do something to refill the water in the ocean and only draw water, after some time, there will be less water available, and therefore, the cost of getting the water will be very high. 


So the goal at the top of the funnel is to create awareness; the person may not buy your product but he knows you. And when they receive a bottom-of-the-funnel message, they are more likely to trust you. At Kotak, we spend 40% of our budget on TV and the other 60% on digital. 

Is C-TV a marquee event medium for you or do you advertise on it all year long, given that the number of households is just around 20-25 million?

Connected TV is just another channel. It is the same question people asked when digital was first introduced. I approach C-TV similarly to how I approach digital. There are some consumers who are watching content on C-TV, and we want to serve ads to them while they are on that particular channel. 

Most C-TV users are affluent consumers. If I have an 811 proposition (Kotak's 811 zero balance digital bank account) that is directed towards the core Indian consumer, I will not put it on C-TV. However if I have a more affluent proposition and the consumer is on C-TV, I will serve that consumer with that particular proposition on the medium.

 It is not about whether we have 20 million or 100 million customers on a particular medium; it is about whether we have a good understanding of who that customer is. And what is the right messaging to give to that customer on that particular channel. 

C-TV is growing quickly. I think it's more affluent users at this stage; we have to start small, and as that segment grows, we will keep investing in it.