Axis Bank’s ‘open ki aadat’ turns a warning into habit

01 · What Axis Bank did

Axis Bank has taken a deliberately indirect route to promote its mobile banking app, open. The campaign, titled ‘open ki aadat’, began when creators across food, travel, beauty and tech received an unbranded notification that read: “Don’t open this. Varna aadat pad jayegi.” The first posts carried no brand name and ended before the notification was opened.

Days later, the same creators returned to reveal that they had opened it, discovered the open app by Axis Bank and tried its features. The warning had, in effect, become the habit the line predicted.

02 · From creator reveal to a wider expectation

Axis Bank then stretched the idea beyond the app. Creators began drawing parallels between the convenience they experienced inside the app and what they expect from other everyday services. The premise: a seamless banking experience can reset how consumers judge convenience elsewhere.

Each follow-up video used an everyday banking problem and showed a relevant feature solving it:

• One-View
• My Spends
• Control Centre
• Safety Centre
• Mobile App Code
• Investments
• Lock FD

All the films return to one question: if a bank can offer this level of convenience, why should customers settle for less from other services?

03 · Why this matters for brand leaders

For CMOs, this is a useful two-phase creator architecture: an unbranded pattern interrupt first, a branded product demonstration second. The first phase earns attention before asking for a product decision; the second attaches the brand to the benefit. It is a habit play, and ‘aadat’ is the campaign’s own word for it.

There is also a positioning shift at work. Axis Bank is not framing open as a transaction tool, but as a convenience benchmark that should raise customer expectations across categories. That is more memorable than a feature list.

The caveat: this is a Brand Connect Initiative produced by the Axis Bank team, so it presents the brand’s own view of the work. The test for any teaser is whether the reveal pays off the interruption. If the product demo feels thinner than the tease, curiosity can turn into disappointment.

04 · What to watch

The campaign’s real test is whether the creator-led habit framing changes app usage or perception. Marketers can borrow the two-phase structure without copying the execution: create a genuine curiosity gap, withhold the brand long enough to earn attention, then reveal a feature that answers a specific daily problem.

Source: Brand Connect Initiative

Mad About Marketing Desk The strategists and writers at Mad About Marketing, writing up what we see in the work every week.