Branding a Bank Means Analyzing the Market

Branding A Bank — Where To Start?

All good bank advertising starts with a complete analysis of the market. That means considering the banking competition, the bank customer, and the bank advertiser. Completion of banking market analysis begins the process of creating a brand and the advertising that steals market share from the banking competition. To increase a bank's market share, however, you must begin with the creative brief, a strategic blueprint that defines the bank's objectives. The overall intent is to give the creative team as much strategic traction as possible and help them understand the bank's brand, the banking target audience, and the financial marketplace. Out of this “starting gate” rush the bank's advertising messages that define the bank's brand to the customer.

The Brief

To prepare a brief that will steal share for your bank brand, you must take this approach one step further, into a complex realm. The experts at stealingshare.com have a process we use in tearing a market apart, a process that relies on the ageless wisdom of Socrates and the deductive reasoning of Sherlock Holmes. Borrowing from the Socratic method, the bank branding process begins by asking intuitive questions and progresses by using the sleuth’s skills at discovering the hidden messages, bank brand meanings, and opportunities that rise up as a result of well-formulated questions. The creative brief starts with an audit of the bank brand, which is an assessment of the current meaning of a bank's brand within the context of competing banks and credit unions in the marketplace. This process requires making as few assumptions as possible, because existing marketing “wisdom” may be based on nothing that is actually important or meaningful to the banking customer.

Defining The bank's Brand

After the audit, the brand strategist continues by defining the bank brand, deciding what the bank brand has permission to do, and determining who the bank customer believes he is when he buys into the brand identity and uses the brand. The strategist begins this definition by plotting the banking brand landscape as the bankers see it (inside-out view) and then again as the bank customers see it (outside-in view). At the end of the day, when it comes to growing bank market share, and branding a bank, the outside-in perspective is more important and profitable. To get proper banking insight, we ask ourselves basic questions, such as: Why does the bank customer care? What emotions do they bring to the decision-making process when choosing a bank? What are their banking assumptions? Who do they believe they are when they use the bank's brands? What other bank brands might they use to accomplish the same result?

The Opportunity Emerges

When the questioning process is done right, the bank market space seems fresh and new. Opportunity prevails when we find differences between the bank's customers’ emotional needs and the bank market’s promises and we position the brand in a way that takes advantage of a mismatch. This is how you brand a bank. Often, when evaluating banking brand messages, we find that the brand promises are as benign and meaningless as a restaurant category’s promise of “we sell food” with only a few enlightened brands defining themselves further by stating that they serve “breakfast, lunch, and dinner.” In such cases, it is impossible for the customer to distinguish one brand of bank from another. So they surrender and choose the banking market leader.

Next, we need to analyze the category of banking messages. One of the hard rules in branding a bank is to be different and better. The temptation, however, is to copy the market leader. After all, haven’t they been a hugely successful bank? The problem with that thinking is that market leaders are often not enjoying their success as a result of their current brand messages. If the advertisers are all selling category — for example, if the banks are all saying, “We have many ATMs,” the customer will choose the bank market leader. It is a fatal mistake to attempt to “out-Intel” Intel. If I am a customer that needs “Intel Inside” to feel complete, I won’t feel the same level of satisfaction buying something that says “AMD Inside.” The meaning of AMD needs to be felt before I place AMD inside my PC. You can’t beat the bank market leader by shadowing and you cant brand a bank by imitation.

You simply need to choose a brand position that has meaning to the customer and can out-maneuver the leader. We must know how the banking market is being informed before we can clearly characterize what the bank brand advertising is intended to achieve. We must find the single most important thing that causes the bank's target audience to change their minds and use the bank's brand. To do this, we plot the existing banking messages. We look at the entire universe of choices and seek to understand the banking trends. Are the competitive banks using humor? Slice of life? Testimonial? Exaggeration? Irony? Are they building the bank brand through music, imagery, or wordplay? We need to know because being different requires knowing where everyone else is the same. Branding a bank requires no less.

When the creative staff is finally briefed, the process is anything but brief. They should leave the briefing room as experts on the bank brand, the banking category, messaging, bank advertising, and, most importantly, the target audience and its emotional and physical needs. Armed with this knowledge, the creatives are ready to produce work that steals share and brands the bank to win

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