Truly Deeply/Madly

If you speak to most brand man­agers I’m sure you’ll find that a brand attribute they all strive to own is Trust with a cap­i­tal T. Trust is fun­da­men­tal to the suc­cess of obtain­ing and keep­ing cus­tomers. With this in mind its been inter­est­ing to watch some of our major banks over the past few months as they try to con­vince their cus­tomers they can be Trusted.

ANZ is cur­rently on TV with a set of ads that seeks to dif­fer­en­ti­ate them from the com­pe­ti­tion with the line ’ We live in your world’. Using flat, unin­spir­ing images of a ‘com­pet­i­tive’ bank, and a com­edy sketch for­mat,  they paint a pic­ture of the com­pe­ti­tion as slippery,economic with the truth and unac­count­able. ANZ by con­trast is none of those things. Cue bright branch envi­ron­ment, smil­ing staff mem­ber to wel­come you. At ANZ they under­stand you because they live in your world.

Sim­i­larly West­pac was recently on TV pro­mot­ing its approach to bank­ing by using their man­agers to tell us about the new branches that are open­ing. These were real, named, West­pac peo­ple, talk­ing heads, all in open neck white shirts, who ner­vously deliv­ered their one line pledges to cus­tomer ser­vice. In there own way both ads are say­ing the same thing — trust us, we under­stand you, we are you, we have your inter­est at heart.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC58URpEqn4&feature=related

Do they work, are they worth the mar­ket­ing invest­ment? I started my work­ing life in bank mar­ket­ing and since then I’ve worked with a num­ber of major banks and finan­cial ser­vices organ­i­sa­tions, in the UK and Aus­tralia, on their mar­ket­ing and com­mu­ni­ca­tion strate­gies, so I feel emi­nently qual­i­fied to com­ment (frankly, as does any bank customer!)

My advice is it’s as sim­ple as this — actions speak louder than words and  when it comes to banks many of their actions over the last few years have been Trust breakers.

Con­sider branch clo­sures, the demise of the local man­ager as a trusted com­mu­nity advi­sor and the way the banks have behaved (or more cor­rectly mis­be­haved) over pass­ing on inter­est rate rises in recent times.

While the ANZ ad made me smile and does a good job in car­i­ca­tur­ing what  the cus­tomer would see is wrong with banks it still felt like a big bank telling me it could be trusted — am I going to believe they are any dif­fer­ent just because they say they are?

Whilst the man­agers on dis­play in the West­pac ads seemed nice enough peo­ple, and I applaud the effort to increase front­line con­tact as a step in the right direc­tion, I didn’t get the feel­ing they would be able to do any­thing about my  ‘Trust’ issues. Sig­nif­i­cantly West­pac was being ham­mered by the media (and the gov­ern­ment) for its inter­est rate pol­icy at the same time they were on TV. negat­ing any pos­i­tive feel­ings I might have for what is in fact my bank.

So what can the banks do to build Trust?

The lat­est ‘Eye on Aus­tralia’ report by Grey and Sweeney Research has found Australia’s 10 most trusted brands were :

1. Sal­va­tion Army 2. Google 3. Aus­tralia Post 4. Medicare 5. Bun­nings 6. Cad­bury 7. San­i­tar­ium 8. Uncle Toby’s 9. Kellogg’s 10. Nokia

One things all these brands have in com­mon was that they touch the lives of Aus­tralians every day  - the les­son they teach is don’t tell us what you stand for, show us what you stand for.

Storm and Brand DNA is a cre­ative brand agency that works with many clients to help them define and demon­strate what they stand for . If you’d like to know how we could help your brand give us a call.

Mal­colm Har­vey
Client Expe­ri­ences Director

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 18th, 2010 at 8:30 am and is filed under Experiences. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.