Summary
Team Cashless: An integrated marketing campaign urging Indian customers to nominate non-digitized retailers, creating a pan India digitized payments movement
Challenge
In 2015, India had dismal ranks when it came to digital payments acceptance with only two percent of 60 million merchants accepting digital payments. Since that, multiple initiatives by the government and industry have helped that number increase to almost 10 million by 2020. While the government has taken steps across awareness, education, and policy – the last mile adoption of digital payments has been held back by the need for infrastructure, inertia against change, and economic reasons.
Objective
The objectives for this campaign were classified across: • Behavior Change: Merchant nominated & converted for digitization of payments • Engagement: Merchant base engaged meaningfully across verticals and cities • Sentiment: Lifts in brand sentiment amongst merchants in a pre/post scenario
Strategy
Despite the national call for adopting digital payments, small-town retailers were not responding and remained unmoved by the voice of government and change agents. Our insight was simple yet powerful. These retailers trusted only one source of influence, their customers. As retailers, they valued relationships and hence the people who walked into their shops every day. Therefore, the encouragement for digital payments had to be spearheaded by them. Our strategy was to galvanize consumers of small-town retailers across the country to nominate and encourage their neighbourhood stores to go digital for payments. THE STRATEGIC SHIFT ADOPT DIGITAL PAYMENTS FOR REWARDS & CONVENIENCE TO ADOPT DIGITAL PAYMENTS FOR RELATIONSHIPS The Big Idea Consumers becoming the catalyst and motivating force for retailers to adopt digital payments
Data
In 2015, India had dismal ranks when it came to digital payments acceptance with only two percent of 60 million merchants accepting digital payments. Since that, multiple initiatives by the government and industry has helped that number increase to almost 10 million by 2020. However, there is still a long way to go with 5 out of every 6 merchants still not availing the many benefits of accepting digital payments *Source Brand Data
Solution
We conceptualized a pan India movement called Team Cashless. To ensure the campaign is relatable to the small towns of India, we leveraged Dhoni as the face. A series of TVCs were also launched in eight languages along with CNBC Storyboard special show. Customers were asked to share contact details of their favourite merchant. MasterCard would fast track their efforts to get them on the digitization highway. Multi-city campaign was launched which included local market visits, regional media roundtables, panel discussions and a TVC.
Results
OBJECTIVE #1 : BEHAVIOUR CHANGE Team cashless had massive behaviour change agenda in its crosshairs, and that's where it delivered emphatically. More than 32000 merchants were nominated to go digital from every nook and corner of the country, and across categories – thus exceeding the targeted nominations by 60%. What's more, a whopping 13000 merchants were converted thus adding to mastercard's merchant base – almost double of the target acquisitions we had set the campaign start. OBJECTIVE #2 : MEANINGFUL ENGAGEMENT While it invoked them of bharat to take action, it reached an even bigger base of more than 6 mn merchants thus engaging the shopkeepers of bharat with the power of direct outreach – an otherwise tough audience to reach. and this engagement came from across cities, across verticals as the campaign spoke to the merchant base with an inclusive voice, excluding none ! OBJECTIVE #3 : POSITIVE BRAND SENTIMENT Engagement with this huge base of merchants sparked off a great relationship with mastercard, as post campaign surveys indicated a close to 100% rise in positive sentiment towards the brand
