Cred is a Fintech Giant founded by Kunal Shah in 2018. If you have not heard about Cred, you must have been living under a rock. It turned into a unicorn with a current valuation of $6.4 billion as of June, 2023.
Cred gained popularity because of its innovative approach to credit card management and its rewards for timely payment of bills. It allows users to track expenses and manage multiple credit cards. It also enables P2P lending between high-trusted individuals.
The company spent Rs. 713 crores in FY 22-23 on marketing while a year before, the number was even higher at Rs. 976 crores.
Market Positioning of Cred
Cred has positioned itself as an exclusive club and their only call to action is ‘download the app’. It is an elite member-only club. Since the beginning, the brand has been clear about its target audience. Earlier, their exclusivity was also extended to their Instagram which was a private account. Only the accepted requests make it through but has recently gone public.
With their tagline ‘Not everyone gets it, the message is being sent very clearly. One has to tick a certain checklist to join it, that is, a credit card holder with a credit score of over 750. They handpick their audience and curate marketing strategies to target them accordingly.
The company published a full-page newspaper ad with copy that wasn’t even well-readable. They really don’t want everyone to get it!
Whether it is sending cakes to its customers as a reminder to pay the bills or its unconventional advertisements, they follow unique way of branding.
Cred’s campaigns will go down in history as the most successful and talked about campaigns ever. From their Great to Good campaign, Play it Different, Not Everyone Gets it, Cred created ads that made their target audience nostalgic with celebrities like Rahul Dravid, Madhuri Dixit, Anil Kapoor, Kapil Dev, Ravi Shastri, etc.
Cred used Social Triggers
The campaign used Social Currency, Triggers, Emotions, Practical Value, Public, and Stories or the STEPPS framework which became the recipe for going viral. Soon, other brands joined the bandwagon and started making memes on the advertisements.
Cred’s ads are unconventional, unexpected, cheeky and creative. They used quirky humor to draw attention. You know they are doing something right with marketing when you heard people screaming “Indiranagar ka gunda hu mei!” out of no where!
While not everybody wants to be associated with Cred’s intrusive business model, which has been formed as a big-boy club, they sure talked about their advertisements. With in no time, after each campaign the brand got increased recognition because of word of mouth.
It is ironic that Kunal Shah once said that a brand doesn’t need to spend on marketing if they have a good product to offer and here is his company spending about 60% of revenue on it. But taking no credit away, Cred has done an incredible job!