Be my Bastard

Consumer insights are a good thing. Knowing how people think about your issue or brand gives ideas a handy reality check.
But insight alone is not a strategy.
Take this poster pasted up at Windsor station.
The insight is clear; people think banks are opportunistic, fee-hungry undesirables.
Hence the headline: Sign up to fight unfair banking. And what I presume to be the new NAB tagline: More give, less take.
Which would all be fine if you were something other than one of the big four banks who created the unfair banking in the first place.
Bendigo Bank could run this poster. The teacher's credit union could run it.
But NAB can't.
Every time any of the big banks report those multi-billion dollar profits, people think of all the petty little ways their hard-earned savings have been siphoned off.
Two bucks to use another bank's ATM. Six bucks for making 'too many' transactions. Thirty-five bucks for bouncing a cheque.
The irritating nature and random lack of generosity of these charges (ATM fees are a particularly naked brand of opportunism) stick in the craw most.
While it may well be true that the ninja account has no 'unfair' fees, it's certain they're gonna get you somewhere else.
So why persist with this strategy? There must be something in it since each of the big four are all doing variations of the same theme.
ANZ has 'Barbara' the bank manager.
CommBank has their good marketing folk protecting us from the shallow American ad guys.
Westpac's have their 'Dog WIth A Bone' managers.
And now NAB.
No doubt that all these spots will 'track well'. They play to our preconceptions.
But they don't change them.
Nobody likes being sold to. And we're pretty good at spotting phoneys.
Because banks won't and can't stop charging the infuriating fees they do, the strategy of 'we're your friend, we're just like you' will, in the end, fail.
They're banks. Big, huge, behemothic banks.
And THAT surely is where the gold lies.
In fact, the big four banks are all amongst the twenty biggest banks in the world. And through acquisition both here and overseas, they're only getting bigger.
They're also rated amongst the world's safest. And most profitable.
If my bank is big, safe and knows how to make money, I'll forgive them the paltry fees. Because they are doing the job I hired them to do: keep my money safe.
So that's the rolled-gold, Able & Baker-approved Big Bank Strategy. We might be bastards, but we're good at being bastards. So let us be your bastard.
I'd rather have a hard-nosed bastard in charge of my super than a nice chap with a pleasant smile and a flair for tea-cakes, wouldn't you?
Of course, as a strategy it isn't especially new.
Over to you, Hannibal....

I don't want a friend, I want a bank.

On the weekend, I had to take some money out of an ATM. It was a Westpac one.
I don't bank with Westpac, so I knew I was in for a fee. But that's okay.
I key in my desired amount. Insufficient funds. $2.
I key in a lesser amount. Still insufficient funds. Another $2.
I ask to see my balance. Another $2. No longer ok.
And so I leave the ATM with six dollars less than I started with and a burning desire to start a riot. But I calm down. Until I see this.
Now it's game on.
'We're care factor 50'? 'We're take a jumper just in case'? Now you're taking the piss. You're laughing at my inability to find a non-robbing ATM or real competition in the mortgage market. You're pointing out and underlining the inequity of our relationship, while pretending that we're all equals. And fooling, who?
How did that even get off the creative's pad, let alone get on TV? In a couple of hours, my attitude toward Wetspac turned from ambivilance to irritation to a well-founded suspicion of pure evil.
I've worked on banks in the past. I don't know what it is, but they are obsessed with being liked. With having their charitable deeds and community activism acknowledged. With having their essential place in society acknowledged.
While at the same time charging people $6 to withdraw no money from an outsourced ATM and thinking they won't notice.
Here it is, Banks. I don't want you to be my friend. I don't want you to send me a card at Christmas. I just want you to be a bank, without violating me too vigorously.
Something Barclay's seems to understand.

0.25% Compassion.

Every now and then we get asked to prepare an advertising campaign for a bank and generally the marketing problem is the same; 'people think we're money-grubbing pricks'.

Now partly this is a perception issue; banks do perform an essential function in society and do a lot of good. But the rest of the time, they have a tendency to behave like, well, money-grubbing pricks.

It's something they don't like to hear.

Take yesterday's interest rate cut by the Reserve Bank. To manage the ravages of the global financial crisis, in a climate of crumbling industry and lost jobs, the governers of the nation's monetary policy decide to reduce interest rates by 0.25%.

The aim of this policy was to reduce the financial pressure on households and get them spending again, to speed the economic recovery.

This event was widely reported, and the nation's families were eagerly anticipating the cut.

And the reponse of the banks? To keep most if not all of the cut as profit. Westpac, ANZ and CBA passed on just 0.1% of the cut while NAB passed on nothing at all.

The RBA fired it's best shot in the locker, only to see it almost entirely absorbed into the bottom lines of the Big Four banks, who've taken advantage of the GFC by buying up smaller lending institutions and consolidating their oligopoly on home mortgages.

The recession, and the near-perfect exchange of information enabled by the internet, has made this high-handed behaviour unacceptable to the modern consumer. As the article in the Economist says, it's compassion that people are looking for in brands now, not vaucous statements.

If you're going to behave this way, why bother running ads like the one below? You're treating your customers as less than stupid. And in the end, your bank's brand will be the one to pay.