The list of PR blunders, missteps and mixed messages in the financial industry is growing by the day. In the last month alone, we've seen a bank take receipt of another private jet, a prominent CEO get caught purchasing a $1,200 waste basket while recording a $12 billion loss and banking bonuses come under even more public scrutiny. Even our usually PR-savvy president failed to properly manage expectations around the government's financial rescue package, contributing to another terrifying downward lurch in the stock markets.
With so many moving parts, and with the speed of information accelerating, it is to be expected that communicators are having difficulty taking stock, crafting effective messages and responding appropriately. For this very reason, it would be valuable to examine a few firms within financial services that have managed to deliver effective campaigns in spite of the market turmoil, and see what these examples might have to teach us.
Friendly Competition
During the 2008 Christmas season, online bank ING announced it was cancelling its holiday party and was going to use the money it was saving to pay off the December mortgages for 500 of its customers. Better still, it turned the exercise into an online essay competition, asking its customers to explain why they were most in need of having their mortgage payments forgiven for a month.
Not only did this preempt any negative lottery associations, but it also enhanced ING's image of fairness and, from a cynic's point of view, gave them pages of human interest stories of people suffering through the recession, which they could feed to media outlets hungry for this kind of material.
ING perfectly assessed the public's need to see generosity during tough times (and at Christmas), as well as a bank showing some humility amid the scandals and endless compensation disputes. The result was media and blog coverage probably comparable in value to the mortgages it had forgiven.
Two To Tango
When Wells Fargo won the dispute with Citigroup for control of Wachovia, the firm swiftly launched a new blog (incidentally, the bank's fifth): The Wells Wachovia blog: http://blog.wellsfargo.com/wachovia. The site, along with its new tagline, "One team twice as strong," was designed to be a resource for joint customers, and a place where they could voice concerns, share feedback and receive answers to their questions.
The speed with which the site was established, along with the rapid popularity it gained among Wells Forgo and Wachovia customers, garnered significant media attention, which in turn drove traffic to the site. The response to the blog has been positive overall, with many holding it up to be a great example of what banks should be doing to build better more transparent relationships with their customers.
Look Who's Talking
E*Trade has studiously incorporated irreverence into its brand for a number of years, but its decision to shift its advertising away from portraying adult traders to a talking, trading baby was a brave move, even in an up market. When the market soured in 2008, the firm would have been forgiven for retrenching to a more conservative position. Instead, E*Trade took the brand to the people, setting up a YouTube channel for "advertisement outtakes," a Facebook page and even a Twitter feed (current tweet: "Dude, in this market we're lucky we're babies and not baby boomers!"). Its Twitter feed alone has more than 1,100 followers.
So, what characteristics did these successful campaigns have in common?
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Thinking on their feet: Neither ING nor Wells Fargo had very long to put these campaigns in place. But they did not use the speed of events as an excuse, rather they used it as an opportunity. Had ING canceled a party after Christmas or forgiven its clients' February mortgages the gesture would have lost its impact.
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Embracing the market: None of these campaigns shied away from the market turbulence. E*Trade remained jocular even in the face of what must be some terrifying losses for its customers. In fact, both E*Trade and ING used the concerns to their advantage; ING playing off the market concern about corporate excess and E*Trade offering us some much- needed catharsis. In all cases the risk of backfire was significant, but the gamble paid off.
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Involving their customers: All three of these campaigns--whether it's the E*Trade baby's Facebook page, ING's competition or the Wells/Wachovia blog--rely on their customers' involvement to fuel the content. All, to a greater or lesser degree, created a dialogue with the market, and that is the secret to their success.
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Using new media: Ultimately, that dialogue would not be possible without leveraging new and social media. It is a measure of how important social media has become today that it is impossible to imagine any of these campaigns succeeding without an online component. PRN
CONTACT:
Dan Simon heads up Cognito Americas, a communications agency focused on the financial industry. He can be reached at [email protected].