Cholamandalam Investment and Finance Company Limited (Chola), is the financial services arm of the Murugappa Group, providing a variety of loan options to its customers. The vision of Chola is to enable its growing clientele of over 8 lakh customers to enter a better life. Since Chola is a small loans provider, most of its consumer base consists of middle-class Indians, especially from tier 2 and tier 3 towns. This is why it was crucial that our communication and design strategy appealed to this audience segment in order to create maximum engagement. The core objective of our redesign strategy for Chola was to break away from previous design formats and offer a fresh new look.
The Target Audience that we were dealing with is the middle-class section of the Indian society. The visual appeal of both the design and the copy has to go hand in hand for the TA to be able to relate to it. The campaigns were tailor-made for the TA to ensure maximum shareability. The ideation for the campaigns primarily involved topics trending with socio-economic groups we were targeting. The TA had to be able to identify with these topics in order to feel compelled to share the posts.
Throughout a number of brainstorming and ideation sessions keeping the target audience and their interests in mind, the team explored various approaches and ideas. During this process, we decided that the best approach would be to understand the feelings of the TA. By putting ourselves in their shoes, we would be better able to understand the kind of content our target audience would find engaging. This was one of the best ways to gain traction as viewers can relate best when they see their life stories projected creatively on their screens. All of our campaigns for Chola mainly focused on trending topics of that period to maximize the shareability of the posts.
With our campaigns for Chola, we decided to try out something new in terms of design style. Having utilized a vectorized design style over the past campaigns, we decided to give the new campaigns a fresh new look. Instead of vector designs, we used detailed, sketched, hand-drawn line illustrations to retain the sophisticated nature of the brand in a creative way. We also utilized the latest super tools in design gadgets.
The design process began with ideation of themes, conceptualization of scenarios based on the content and visualizing people, actions, costumes, spaces and objects to portray in the designs. The next step involved collecting and documenting relevant imagery on the basis of the ideation. Followed by this was the creation process of digitally hand-drawing sketches and creating customised vectors with reference to the collected imagery. Once this process was completed, the colour palette, font styles and the layout were structured and executed.
Our campaigns for Chola usually revolve around a central theme. They include a series of creative images which relate to the theme and tell a compelling story. Here are a few of the design campaigns we created for Chola which performed very well on social media.
Children’s Day was around the corner and so we conceptualized an interesting campaign for the same. There has been a drastic change in the lifestyles of children today compared to children 10-20 years back. The central theme of this campaign was to portray how children from the previous generation led such different lives as compared to children today. We tried bringing in various aspects of childhood like pocket money, holidays, summertime and weekends as themes to compare children then and children now.
A detailed line drawing sketches were made to portray different scenarios. Only the images of the children had colours added to ensure that the emphasis was solely on them. The layout was kept very simple using minimal colours as the drawings were intricate.
Goals and Dreams are different yet interrelated. We created a metaphoric representation of this concept for the #DreamsToGoals campaign. The basic story of this campaign centred on an entrepreneur who strives to cross a cliff. Using a story-based design representation, the concept made it easier to understand and more relatable.
The design attributes followed in this campaign were meaningful illustrations designed with a minimalist aesthetic. A fresh and bright colour palette was used to break the monotony of past designs in the finance industry and create a new visual language. A clean typography, layout and illustration style was implemented throughout the series to express the sophisticated nature of the company.
This campaign shines the spotlight on the untold success stories of small business owners who have made it big. Throughout our design process, we focused on portraying the achievements of these small business owners in a captivating, original manner. A clever collage representation of the content was executed by overlapping images over illustrations. We also added minimalistic movements to the design elements to make it more compelling. The colour palette used in this campaign was a combination of gradients in relevance to the businesses. A clean decorative placement of the copy added to the visual element to the designs.
These campaigns performed very well on social media, garnering a high number of reactions, comments and shares. These numbers proved that creative and thoughtfully designed posts can engage with customers, contribute towards a positive brand image and increase brand awareness. You can also read our blog on What Brands Can do to Engage With India’s Next Billion Users to find more ways to capture the attention of your consumers.