Imagine you are wasting away in front of your phone with a viral video when somebody in the car sunroof starts screaming about credit card bills, and it is none other than Rahul Dravid, AKA The Wall. Your head makes a double take. Did the most poised and cool-headed cricketer of Indian cricketing history recently lose his mind because of... fintech? Drive into the madness of CRED payment advertisements where rational thinking dies and brand recall is created.
No, it is not a bug in the matrix when you have felt the need to watch CRED ads at least thrice to make sense of what you just saw. This is a psychologically sophisticated warfare product branded as entertainment and done with precision engineering. And it is pretty effective.
The sheer difference in marketing strategy practised by CRED is not simply the creation of some wild animal with red meat but an intentional attempt to bypass the ad-blocker mechanisms in your brain. The old advertising school is patterned with problem identification, solution presentation and a call to action. CRED discards this playbook and instead implements what can only be termed as organized chaos.
In India, the psychology of advertising has always depended on emotional story-telling and celebrity endorsing. CRED builds a funhouse on this foundation, however. When Kumar Sanu comes upon and speaks of creditworthiness in the song like it is a romantic ballad, the strangeness that your brain is subjected to is known by psychologists as cognitive dissonance, i.e. the discord between reality and expectation.
This is quite a powerful form of cognitive dissonance advertising as your mind is stimulated to work extra hard to digest the information. In scenarios where your neural networks need to burst their way through unexpected contents, they leave more entrenching memory traces. It is like diverting on the route you normally use, which you would not remember because it was unnatural, but you will remember because it was a change.
This is how the genius of CRED comes into play: in a world where an average person perceives more than 5,000 ads daily, it is not only an advantage to be memorable but also the key to survival. Ridiculous advertisements that have become a norm in India over recent years are not unintentional forms of saturation in advertisement; they are calculated reactions.
Like a severe head injury, CRED uses what has been termed by neuroscientists as the von Restorff effect, the ability to recall things that stick out like sore thumbs. When you look at a typical insurance advertisement and then see a CRED advertisement where Jackie Shroff talks about his credit scores under a yoga pose, which one will be remembered? The solution is clear, and CRED is aware of it.
It is not like this is a weirdness to be weird. It is about realizing that when the economy is based on attention, it is more pertinent to become confusing than vivid. Viewers tend to be more into it when they do not know what they are watching at a certain moment, and they attempt to comprehend the material. This increment of interactions has a direct conversion to increased brand recall and, eventually, conversion.
When disruptive marketing by CRED shifts its gears towards behavioural change, real magic will be found. It has perfected what I will term as addiction by design, the application of the same psychological mechanism that makes social media platforms and mobile games extremely addictive.
All aspects of CRED user experience are designed to appeal to your unique neurochemistry. Gamified marketing uses the schedule of variable ratio reinforcement through the app- by the same means that makes slot machines so addictive. As users spin the CRED jackpot wheel, they do not play but are engaged in a complex game behavioural conditioning experiment.
Push notifications have a timing aspect to them, as they capitalize on FOMO (fear of missing out) since they come when users are usually glued to their phones. The reward aspect offers rewards in real-time, such as cashback and CRED coins that release dopamine and give positive reinforcement towards the brand. These are all addictive strategies in digital marketing, and this is not a coincidence; rather, all these are well-studied strategies of human psychology and behaviour.
Advertising trends in the Indian fintech industry have grown fast over the last decade.
However, CRED is novel. The company realizes that Indian consumers, especially millennials and Gen Z, have created advanced defence systems against old-fashioned marketing. They can identify a sales pitch within a mile's distance and have been able to tune into the old-school marketing messages.
CRED's solution? Don't sell - entertain. Don't explain - intrigue. It is not what the rules say you should do [68]. It is how the rules may be rewritten in the form of what should be done.
This strategy has been the most successful with the Indian consumer in the city who likes to think they are smart, learned and too difficult to be deceived. By producing something undeniably off the beaten path, CRED is telling its audience that it is not out to get them in the traditional sense of this word, making the manipulation even more efficient.
Current studies in neuromarketing have presented intriguing revelations regarding how our brains react to unconventional advertising material. When we see surreal advertisements that India has come to make well-known, our brains not only read the information but also go into a state that researchers label as a heightened state of attention.
It is a neurological reaction caused by our brain that detects threats and goes into action as soon as we find something strange and unexpected. Although the issue of Bappi Lahiri talking about financial responsibility in a CRED advertisement is not a threat, it still comes across as a surprise to generate this effect and fill our brains with attention-stimulating hormones.
The end effect is that the viewers are more interested in surreal work than in traditional advertising. Their active thinking helps to deep-process the information, building stronger neurons and longer-lasting memories. This is why you might easily remember some particular features of a CRED ad you watched several months ago but cannot remember the appearance of an ad of any other fintech company.
Regarding user acquisition, one of the most psychologically advanced solutions developed by CRED is concerned. CRED pulls artificial scarcity and exclusivity by posing itself as a platform where only people with high credit can use it. This is a basic psychology of humans:
We desire what we can not afford, and what others can not get, we do not want.
This principle of exclusivity is supported in and across CRED advertising. The ads not only introduce the app's capabilities; they convey to us the notion that CRED is an app for a specific type of user, a user who understands the concepts of finances, is creditworthy and worthy of rewards. It forms a strong psychological desire and motivation on the viewers' side to increase their credit score to access the platform.
Let us see how CRED creates her psychological masterpieces. All CRED advertisements have the following structure: create a sense of normalcy, introduce the chaos, keep the mess intact and finish with brand messaging. This script is meant to carry the audience on an emotional rollercoaster that does not incorporate intellectualism.
The commercials are usually opened by an easily identifiable object in a known location, which makes them familiar and brings them comfort and familiarity. Then, suddenly, the situation turns absurd. The viewer's brain feels taken by surprise and cannot contend with the situation. In this instance of involuntary cognitive susceptibility, CRED presents its brand messaging not in the form of straightforward sales propaganda but by association and implication.
The underlying power of this method is that it avoids involving critical thinking that typically questions the advertising statements. The more your brain seeks explanations for why Rahul Dravid is screaming about credit cards, the less you are bound to question CRED's value proposition.
The strategy of CRED can be instructive to other firms that attempt to find a niche in the Indian market with a lot of competition. The main lesson recurrently is that boring is the greatest risk in the attention-deficit world. The businesses that will still be using the old advertising methods will become more and more unseen by the consumers who are already accustomed to ignoring the old offers.
Yet, CRED may also demonstrate that creative advertising should be supported by good product development. The new apps and services the company offers its customers fulfil the implications of its advertising campaigns, thus creating a consistent user experience that strongly supports the brand positioning.
Although it is truthful to say that the CRED advertising strategy works, it poses ethical questions regarding the issue of psychological manipulation in advertisements. It is not only through these techniques that the CRED ads are memorable and interesting; they can be applied to advertise products or behaviours the consumer will regret engaging in.
Although the addictive digital marketing methods used by the company are legal and accepted by everyone, they amount to possessing the ability to weaponize human psychology and use it to fuel engagement and retelling. This presents the issue of corporate responsibility and the necessity of more transparency regarding the use of psychological information and its application in consumer influence by companies.
CRED has revolutionized the Indian advertising industry as it shows that being absurd might be more convincing than being rational, confusing more interesting than factual, and entertaining worth more than informative. Their success illustrates that as things stand nowadays in the media, traditional advertising methods are not only non-efficient but also largely unnoticeable.
A combination of cognitive dissonance advertisement, on the one hand, the product of extensive and advanced neuromarketing, on the other hand, and a well-thought-out user experience has made the company pioneer a new example of how a brand can establish meaningful relationships with the customer and create a type of template to follow in the digital age.
Yet the most impressive feature of the strategy of CRED is that it makes the viewer feel intelligent owing to being able to understand the joke even when being a victim of a psychological gamble. The advertisements are so straightforward and ridiculous that they joke, making people seem part of the joke. Hence, there is a feeling of complicity and sensitivity between the brand and the audience.
Over time, you will discover that more brands are taking the CRED-style advertisement. Whether ridiculous marketing will be more prevalent is not a question; a real question is whether other firms can do such marketing as CRED has done. Since being weird is not enough, you must have the purpose, strategy and impeccable generating intent to be weird.
The psychology of CRED advertisements teaches us that in this world where we are choking on content, the brands that end up surviving will not be the ones that scream the loudest, but the ones that bring us to a stop, thought and memory. And sometimes, that requires an abandonment of logic and succumbing to the rustic nightmare of human psychology.
Well, why not? In an attention economy, sanity itself is the weirdest currency.
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