VANCOUVER, B.C. — Two large greeting cards are circulating the Greater Vancouver area, gathering signatures from people wishing to "thank" Canadian banks for the fees banks charge them to access their own money.
"B.C.'s Largest Greeting Card" is the brainchild of Lawrie Ferguson, senior vice president of marketing for Coast Capital Savings, Canada's second-largest credit union. Ferguson, who credited advertising agency Rethink for its assistance on the idea behind the card, said the goal of the campaign was to garner media attention-and it has succeeded.
Coast Capital, which has $12.3 billion in assets and serves 404,000 members through 51 branches in the area, launched a free checking account in 2005. Although free checking is common in the U.S., Ferguson noted, Coast Capital was the first full service financial institution in Canada to offer it.
Each year since 2005, Coast Capital has developed a new method of marketing its free checking. "This year, we did a parody of how much people love bank fees," she explained. "Canadian bank ads are very conservative, with lots of smiling people. Our parody shows people talking about bank fees and how happy fees make them. We take financial services seriously, but we don't take ourselves seriously, and this is a point of differentiation."
The first card made its debut, at Waterfront Station, a transportation hub in downtown Vancouver. Coast Capital employees handed out t-shirts emblazoned with the slogan "I Love Fees" and asked people to sign the card. A second card made the rounds in Victoria, on Vancouver Island.
"Our national pastime is hockey, but the second national pastime is complaining about the exorbitant amount of money banks make," reported Ferguson. "So it wasn't hard to get people to sign the card."
The cards "congratulated" banks for making $3 billion [Canadian] this year on checking accounts, based on $171 in annual fees per checking account in the country and the CU's estimate on the total number of checking accounts.
Ferguson said the cards were very successful in terms of generating media coverage. In Vancouver, all three TV stations plus several newspapers covered the story live when the cards were unveiled. In addition, Coast Capital was featured in a national marketing magazine.
"As a press event, it worked very well," she assessed. "We wanted to attract some attention and we wanted to have fun. We also got some business out of it, because our downtown branch manager was there handing out his business card and making appointments for people to come by and move their business over.
"Our timing was quite good: the economy isn't great, so people are penny-pinching," she added. "And just that week, some Canadian banks were announcing profits."
The two cards continue to move among Coast Capital branches in Vancouver and Victoria, and people love signing them, Ferguson said. "It is like a good coffee table book-it incites and inspires conversation."
