Open any insurance campaign in India. Then open its competitor's. A family in soft light. A parent watching a child sleep. A line about suraksha, bharosa, or being there har pal. Swap the logos and almost nothing breaks.
This is not a coincidence. It's the category agreeing, quietly, to look the same. And it gets sold to boards every year as "category convention" when it is really a branding failure with better PR.
01 — The PatternWhy it keeps happening
BFSI marketing teams are risk-managed to the point of paralysis. Every line of copy passes through compliance, legal, and a senior stakeholder whose primary memory is the campaign that got someone fired. Agencies learn this fast. They stop bringing the braver route to the table because the braver route never survives the room. Within two or three cycles, everyone has quietly optimised for "this won't get me into trouble" instead of "this will get us remembered."
The result is work that is technically competent, fully compliant, and completely invisible.
02 — The Wrong QuestionThe question nobody asks
Most BFSI briefs start with a version of: how do we look more trustworthy?
Wrong question. In a regulated category, trust is the floor. Every licensed player clears it — they have to. Looking trustworthy doesn't make you distinctive; it makes you eligible. Designing harder against an entry requirement is how you spend a crore to arrive exactly where your competitor already is.
That question has consequences. It forces a point of view. It rules things out. It occasionally makes legal nervous — which is usually the sign you've found something real.
03 — The ShiftWhat changes when you ask it
When we worked on Kotak Life, the click-through lift — about 13% in the first month — did not come from a better-looking asset. It came from reframing the brief before a single visual was designed. The strategic question got rewritten first. The creative was just the honest expression of a sharper answer.
That's the part most processes skip. They treat the brief as fixed and pour all the talent into execution. But a beautifully executed answer to a mediocre question is still a mediocre outcome. It just costs more.
04 — The TestA diagnostic you can run today
Here's a diagnostic any marketing head can run on their own brand work, today, for free.
Take your latest campaign. Mentally replace your logo with your closest competitor's. Does it still make sense?
If it does, you haven't built a brand asset. You've built decoration that happens to have your name on it. And decoration, however polished, does not compound. It does not make the next campaign easier. It does not earn a place in anyone's memory.
Brand work earns its budget when it could only have come from you. Everything else is just the category, agreeing to look the same, one expensive campaign at a time.