Branding strategies are still relatively new to financial services companies and not as highly developed as in the packaged goods industry. But a few banks have made important if incomplete strides.
American Banker asked two experts in the field to walk us through some emerging success stories in branding.
Two Banks, One Brand
When Chemical Banking Corp. and Chase Manhattan Corp. merged two years ago, Chemical brought far more market value to the table and its executives filled a majority of the key posts at the new company.
Why, then, is the nation's biggest bank now called Chase?
Richard Evans, a Connecticut-based consultant who earlier in his career developed marketing strategies for Chase and Citicorp, said Walter Shipley, the Chemical chief who became head of the new Chase, studied the research and concluded Chase was simply the stronger brand.
"He found that, across the world, Chase had better awareness and familiarity, and it had powerful attributes like high status and global reach," Mr. Evans said, with the Rockefeller connection a significant factor. "Chase was aloof, while Chemical was Everyman's bank. The idea was to take Chase's status attributes and blend them with the approachability of Chemical."
Mr. Evans said that despite Chase's loftier image, the organizations were very similar, with comparable visions and values. And they shared a view that their positioning of various businesses such as credit cards, global wholesale, and mortgages was characterized by "relationships."
"Once they had established a common set of values, they understood what the brand promise should be," he said. "That gave them the tag line, 'The right relationship is everything.' "
Chase says it is spending between $45 million and $65 million this year on an advertising campaign that will include newspaper inserts and television commercials.
But that's only the beginning of a branding effort, Mr. Evans said. "Now they must deliver on the promise. What does 'relationship' mean? What does Chase have to do day in and day out to deliver on that promise?
"Customers expect preferential treatment when they do a lot of business with the bank," he explained. "The bank needs the ability to recognize the relationships. All contacts the customer has at the bank should be able to recognize the entirety of the relationship."
Chase still has considerable restructuring of its business process to fully meet the branding promise, he said.
In Fedex's Footsteps
KeyCorp has one of the most integrated approaches to branding in the financial services sector, said Alan Bergstrom, president of the Branding Consultancy, Atlanta.
The bank is tying together all of its services under a single brand and emphasizing trust and access to the bank's expertise. Both are effectively symbolized in the bank's name, Key, and it plans eventually to drop the word "bank" from its identity, Mr. Bergstrom says.
The bank is offering a MasterCard called KeySmart that reduces the interest rate for customers who make more-than-minimum payments on their balances. And it has also offered incentives for customers to use ATMs rather than live tellers.
"They are trying to create a feeling in an industry where there are lookalike offers," Mr. Bergstrom says. "It's a visual identity with the key and an emotional appeal to ideas like security and access."
He said the effort resembled the highly successful campaign by Federal Express Corp. to make itself the generic for air expresss shipments. It has been so successful that the term Fedex has become the new corporate name as well.
"Key is dealing with a more competitive field with a lot more players, but the idea is the same," said Mr. Bergstrom. "They want Key to mean financial services."
