Bank slogans
are not bank brands

Differentiating products and services through advertising is common for many industries. Financial services marketers seem to be having a particularly tough time.

In preparation for my role on a branding panel at a recent Washington Bankers Association marketing conference, I hired a clip service to capture Western Washington bank print advertisements for two months. The panelists also collected their personal financial direct mail for the same period. The result was thousands of ads from scores of banks and credit unions. The junk mail must have weighed 30 pounds.

Consumers are being inundated with financial ads, direct mail and telemarketing. With direct mail, much of the effort attempts to persuade consumers to open envelopes with fake checks, fake government documents and fake come-ons that offer incredibly low interest rates that aren’t that low when one looks at the fine print. Everyone at the conference agreed that this tactic is expected from loan brokers yet seemed surprised to see this tactic from quality institutions like Bank of America. Still, we are seeing more of it.

Precious little direct mail demonstrated why each bank was the right choice. Much of the advertising was not much better.

Carrie Williams, president of BrandLab (www.brandlab.com), agreed to sort through the marketing messages and create brand maps to demonstrate how banks appear to consumers and how banks compete against each other.

Williams has a lot of experience doing this for industries such as health care, fashion and the airlines, and is skilled at getting to the essence of what she calls the brand soul. As she says, brand soul is a reflection of what is core to an organization. It encompasses its values, personality, style of doing business and how it gives back to the community.

The good news is that any bank that wants to stand out through exceptional advertising has almost an open field. The bad news is that the financial industry is rapidly moving to commodity status by educating consumers that all they should consider is the best deal. With the exception of a handful of financial institutions, none of the ads contained any brand attributes at all, per Williams. In essence, most financial institutions are not talking to consumers in ways that are memorable or compelling.

Rather than cluster by brand attributes, the work focused on product and service features. In rank order, offers focused on: better rates, higher return, personal service, product specific, promotions and local community.

Advertisements feature pictures of happy customers, happy employees and experienced bankers. And most of the work is remarkably similar.

There were some exceptions. Bank of America, Washington Mutual, KeyBank, and Wells Fargo all have the kind of advertising one would expect from giant ad budgets. Their messages are consistent; they emphasize ideas that differentiate them from other banks; and they look like quality institutions by having well-produced ads.

Banks with more modest budgets, such as Sterling Bank, Banner Bank and Homestreet Bank, also have done a good job creating work that differentiates and offers marketplace consistency. The rest of the work is just wallpaper.

More of the financial industry is moving away from human interaction and relying increasingly on electronic service, and consumers are embracing this trend in growing numbers. Now they can shop for loans from the privacy of their homes, and they can consider institutions from across the United States.

Fabulous communications are mandatory in our less-personal-touch world. They can give consumers a sense of relationship with their financial institutions and help illustrate through storytelling each bank’s personality in a way that resonates. Still, the evidence would say that banks are being wooed by the notion that ROI is all that counts in communications. If you get the greatest response rate, the story ends there. But does it?

I learned at Disney decades ago that several factors should go into evaluating advertising performance. Campaign performance and ROI count for a lot. Equally important is the net impression that the communications leave behind. With direct mail in particular, a 2 percent response rate is not the only factor. What was the takeaway for the 98 percent who did not respond? At Disney, we cared more about the 98 percent than the 2 percent. And most important of all, we cared that the work reflected well on the Disney values, which every employee understood.

Shareholders and consumers will be well served when bank messaging reflects each bank’s people, values and personality, and the consumer experience reflects those unique attributes in a consistent and winning way. With that said, stop the slogans, research your brand personality and create work that engages the right customers to propel your business forward.

Bill Fritsch, a longtime leader in Seattle’s ad industry, is president of Hydrogen. Call him at 206-389-9500, Ext. 224, or send e-mail to bill@hydrogenadvertising.com.