Bank Brand Marketing Methodology

There are more than 4,000 banks in my country, including six state-owned banks, 12 joint-stock banks, 134 city commercial banks, as well as rural commercial banks, rural credit cooperatives, village banks, private banks, foreign banks, etc.

In recent years, with the implementation of banks' big retail strategy and their increasing attention to mobile traffic management, mobile banking apps have taken over the baton from Alipay and WeChat in subsidizing users in the early days of mobile payments, triggering a war for users. Among them, the instant discount activities for recharges on the CCB Life APP and the Bank of China Mobile Banking APP were the most widely spread. The personal participation of the two heavyweight banks opened the curtain for banks to compete for mobile users.

Behind the vigorous user subsidies is the continued increase in the contribution of retail business to bank revenue. According to the 2021 financial report of China Merchants Bank, in 2021, the revenue of China Merchants Bank's retail financial business was 177.319 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 14.32%, accounting for 58.35% of total revenue. The outstanding performance of retail financial business is not unique to China Merchants Bank. Ping An Bank's retail financial revenue accounted for 58% in 2021, and ICBC accounted for 56.74%. China Minsheng Bank and China Everbright Bank also have the trend of catching up, with retail finance accounting for 41.71% and 41.47% respectively.

At the beginning of 2022, the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission issued the "Guiding Opinions on the Digital Transformation of the Banking and Insurance Industries", and banks will further accelerate their efforts in digitalization, intelligence, mobility, and especially retail financial services.

In contrast to the thriving development of the bank's retail financial business is the bank's relatively outdated and backward brand building.

Among more than 4,000 banks, only a few have distinctive brand characteristics; if the logos of the banks are removed, their promotional posters are almost interchangeable and it is impossible to tell which bank they are; the interface design style of many mobile banking apps is conservative and outdated, the user experience is poor, and the pages of marketing activities lack unified brand standards; the promotion of financial products is similar, for example, consumer loan products are often "high credit limit, no collateral, low interest, and fast loan approval"; most banks' promotional videos are based on the bank itself, which can only satisfy the leaders. Due to the lack of a real user perspective, they cannot resonate with users and it is difficult to achieve the expected communication effect.

Retail finance is a D2C business, and the importance of brand is self-evident . The highly homogeneous industry attributes of financial products further highlight the role of brand in users' decision-making when choosing a bank. Banks are focusing on retail business and accelerating the pace of digital transformation in order to gain the upper hand in the retail war. However, at this critical time when heavy investments are being made in the retail battlefield, little attention is paid to the brand side, which will become a huge concern for banks' continued investment and operations on the user side.

This article will elaborate on the difficulties and breakthroughs in bank brand marketing from the aspects of brand positioning, online and offline advertising, media publicity, public relations management and IP operation.

1. Brand Positioning

In terms of brand positioning, as a large financial institution, the bank’s brand vision, mission and values ​​are relatively clear, carrying the bank’s commercial value and social responsibility. But at the same time, banks often lack brand positioning from a user’s perspective. Among different banks, banks usually lack distinct brand characteristics, and users often only perceive the industry attribute of "bank" rather than the brand's personality.

In terms of brand management, banks usually lack unified brand awareness and clear, effective and enforceable brand specifications; the head office, branches and sub-branches have inconsistent understandings of brand concepts and the importance of brands, lack unified brand management of suppliers, and the brand tone of online and offline materials is inconsistent.

In terms of user insights, user portraits are mainly formed by in-line data, lacking professional comprehensive user insights and analysis from qualitative, quantitative to data mining.

Digital brand marketing should combine the bank’s resource endowment, location advantages, product features, historical brand accumulation and user characteristics, and form a brand positioning with its own characteristics based on its vision, mission and values, and take root in the minds of users.

In terms of brand management, a unified brand system should be established, with the head office taking the lead and branches working together to unify brand awareness across the bank; an efficient supplier brand management system and brand output review system should be established to ensure that the materials output by the head office and branches implement a unified brand concept.

In terms of user insights, through qualitative research, quantitative analysis and data mining, we conduct comparative analysis of brand awareness, health, and users of the product, users of competing products, potential users and lost users to gain an in-depth understanding of users and form a user portrait system that is real, effective and sufficiently supportive of the business.

2. Advertising and Marketing

In terms of offline advertising, banks' promotional resources often cover popular resources such as airports, high-speed railways, subways, buses, buildings, outdoor billboards, elevators, and communities. Offline resources are of relatively high quality, but their placement lacks strategy and customer catalyst analysis, and they often adopt a "general spreading" approach to occupy a strong position, which to a certain extent causes a mismatch in target users and a waste of resources.

The advertising delivery cycle is mainly based on long-term cooperation within an annual frame, and the content is updated infrequently. It is often inconsistent with the bank’s main business hotspots, and “expired” promotional resources often appear. For example, in 2021, a billboard at an airport in a provincial capital city still displayed advertising footage of a joint-stock bank’s 2020 anniversary celebration. The offline advertising content of banks is mainly focused on brand exposure, which is more like a conservative "presence display" with less support for business. The advertising effect cannot be tracked and is difficult to quantify.

Digital brand marketing should maintain the bank’s strong offline media resources, conduct scientific analysis of media resources and user media activation habits, combine different businesses with different customer groups, select differentiated media for delivery, maximize the match between media and user groups, and create an information dome for target users. In terms of the delivery cycle, we should distinguish between long-term brand exposure delivery and short-term node and business-driven brand advertising delivery. The delivery rhythm should be consistent with the business rhythm to form efficient management of advertising resources and eliminate waste of resources.

The investment budget is mainly based on an annual framework, and the pace of investment is determined by the bank itself based on the business development of the year, supplemented by milestone node investment to increase the flexibility of investment. In terms of the most important advertising content, digital brand marketing should focus on brand positioning, take brand proposition as the main axis, be guided by business growth, and take into account social responsibility; track conversions of all advertisements and scientifically quantify the brand advertising effects through a variety of methods.

In terms of online advertising, banks mostly use internet platforms such as WeChat Moments, TikTok, iQiyi and Tencent Video.

Generally, the cooperation is based on fixed-rate contracts, based on promotional nodes, such as "the budget for a mobile banking upgrade is 500,000", and there is often a lack of scientific prediction and professional advertising optimization; the rhythm of advertising and the degree of coordination between product upgrades and business promotion are not high, resulting in budget waste. For example, when a provincial branch of a large state-owned bank was implementing the task of promoting the new version of the head office's mobile banking, due to the problem of timeliness in the cooperation of the local advertising company, the WeChat Moments advertisement for the updated version was delayed for more than a month after the new version was launched, missing the promotional node.

The content of online bank advertisements focuses on brand promotional videos, mobile banking upgrades, loan products, etc.; promotional videos are usually narrated from the bank's perspective, with a large scale and high quality, but they fail to hit the user's pain points, resulting in only internal bank employees forwarding them, users being indifferent, and few people giving likes, making it impossible to form large-scale dissemination; the interest points of online bank advertisements are often similar to those of other banks, the brand positioning is unclear, the full-process conversion chain has no closed loop, and the user conversion effect is poor.

Digital brand marketing should select delivery platforms in a targeted manner based on the target users' catalyst habits. Bank-level brand promotions should choose national platforms such as WeChat Moments and TikTok, while business-level brand promotions should flexibly choose vertical leading platforms. Clarify ROI requirements, arrange advertising and budget in a way that combines brand and effect, dare to ask for results from brand advertising, and at the same time, pay attention to the design, production, user experience and advertising optimization of online advertising. Develop a plan for online brand advertising throughout the year, carry out targeted advertising marketing based on the publicity plan, and form three-dimensional communication in the form of campaigns.

In terms of online advertising content, it closely revolves around brand positioning, conveys brand concepts, tells user stories, and promotes product features. The essence of advertising is repetition, repetition, and repetition again. Multiple channels and multiple types should emphasize the same brand proposition, deepen users' brand perception, shape differentiated brand characteristics, closely integrate business and products in brand promotion, open up the product conversion loop, and use the brand to drive product conversion.

3. Media publicity

In terms of media publicity, the bank's media resources generally cover national authoritative media such as People's Daily, People's Daily Online, Xinhua News Agency, Economic Daily, Financial Times, and Caijing.com, as well as provincial and municipal mainstream media, with a wide media coverage. Common forms of publicity include newspaper and website news releases, interviews with leaders, WeChat tweets, various award selections, etc., which are relatively traditional and fixed. The promotional content focuses on annual report release, policy interpretation, leadership interviews, milestone events, rural revitalization, and social responsibility. The audience is mainly regulatory agencies, industries and the media, and user awareness is not strong.

Digital brand marketing should maintain the bank’s media resource advantages and expand to more influential universities, research institutions, new media and online complaint platforms (Sina Black Cat Complaints, China Net Woodpecker Complaints, etc.). The cooperation is mainly in the form of framework cooperation, maintaining good interaction with the chief writers of the financial and economic sections of major media, and establishing the bank’s own media “circle of friends”.

In terms of publicity, we have actively innovated on the basis of the original cooperation mode, and cooperated with universities, research institutions and media to jointly initiate the establishment of research institutes or research centers, and carry out various forms of cooperation such as online and offline special forums, policy interpretations, industry research reports, white paper releases, user stories, etc. At the content level, based on the original content and from the user's perspective, the bank's brand is promoted through media publicity to create a warm and positive brand.

4. Public Relations Management

In terms of public relations, banks' public opinion monitoring generally cooperates with platforms such as Bayes, Sina Public Opinion, and Qingbo Public Opinion. The latter provide public opinion monitoring services, implement public opinion warnings, and submit public opinion reports periodically. The reality is that public opinion reports are relatively useless, and the classification of public opinion: positive, neutral, and negative is relatively rigid. The negative public opinion warned is often "the wolf is coming", and when the real negative appears, it is sandwiched among many invalid negative warnings and difficult to identify.

In terms of handling public opinion, banks often have good relations with the Propaganda Department and the Cyberspace Administration of their regions, and can effectively prevent and control negative public opinion with cooperative media. However, they lack response strategies for media in other places and those with no cooperation, especially online complaint platforms, new media, and financial self-media, and often adopt the approach of letting the innocent be innocent and ignoring the issue.

Digital brand marketing should be combined with the needs of banks to create a customized public opinion monitoring system, while taking into account the mainstream public opinion system, expanding media coverage, and strengthening the monitoring of public opinion platforms that generate more online public opinion; reasonably classify media and public opinion, reduce false alarm rates, increase awareness and insight into regulatory complaint-related public opinion, and reduce regulatory complaint risks.

In terms of public opinion handling, we must focus on internal public opinion training, increase the bank's attention to public opinion work, and reduce the possibility of negative public opinion from the root. At the same time, we will carry out hierarchical management of media resources and key roles, do a good job in daily maintenance, make good use of the media circle of friends and the bank's own resources, find and maintain key people, be aware of media and business minefields that are prone to negative public opinion, and prevent problems before they occur.

5. IP Operation

In terms of IP operation, banks generally have their own mascots, but from IP design to packaging, they are not of high quality and the image is not standardized enough. The operation of IP is generally poor. Mascot IP often needs to be strongly attached to the bank brand. The IP itself does not play a role in brand empowerment on the user side. IP emoticons and peripherals are not widely recognized and used by users.

Digital brand marketing redefines mascot IP, combines brand positioning and user portraits to form an IP that can truly represent the bank's brand image, systematizes and branded the mascot IP, and creates a brand culture ecosystem through IP, eliminating the sense of distance between the bank brand and users, improving favorability, and establishing a personalized brand. Create eight one IP operation systems:

1. A set of mascot IP images that match the brand positioning
2. A complete mascot story
3. A set of mascot emoticons with strong communication power
4. A complete and executable mascot and product integration solution
5. A set of IP joint marketing strategies that can be enriched and expanded
6. A group of mascots with their own characteristics to extend the surrounding area
7. A high-quality mascot promotional film

A clear and executable mascot IP operation methodology:

It is a rational choice for users to like a brand, but it is an emotional investment to like an IP. Rationality + emotion = strong user identification with the brand. Through the linkage of brand strategy + IP operation, new potential for bank brand and business growth can be achieved.

Author: Before knowing

Source: Before Knowing (ID: pre-known)