San Francisco-headquartered Bank of the West has doubled
its investment in promoting customer satisfaction in an effort to
benefit from consumers’ lack of trust in its larger, bailed-out
rivals. Chief marketing officer Andrew Rosen tells Farah Halime
about the bank’s renewed push to attract customers.
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Bank of the West, the
US-based retail subsidiary of BNP Paribas, has revealed it will
spend $1m, up from $500,000 last year, marketing its latest award
for receiving the highest customer satisfaction in California.
The JD Power Satisfaction Index, one of the
more keenly watched surveys in US retail banking, scored the bank
782 out of 1,000 for customer satisfaction to rank it number one in
California for the third year in a row. Its nearest
challengers, Union Bank of California and Wells Fargo scored 771
and 761 respectively.
Capitalising on its regional popularity, the
bank has launched a ‘guerrilla marketing’ approach to boost its
customer base.
Aside from plans to launch a Bank of the
West-sponsored concierge service that will offer the public help on
queries ranging from banking to hotel reservations, the bank has
launched a range of ad creatives pitching its community status and
customer service credentials.
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By GlobalDataThe $1m JD Power marketing scheme has been
kicked off with extensive outdoor advertising, including the
region’s public transport system, as well as street teams signing
up customers.
Andrew Rosen, the new chief marketing officer
at the bank, told RBI: “It is even more important for us
to show how we are different and right now that JD Power message is
important and from that we have doubled the amount we are spending
on previous years to get the word out.”
Rosen said the bank was focused on re-building
trust that has been lost from big rivals such as JPMorgan Chase and
Wells Fargo.
“Fortunately, Bank of the West did not get
caught up with some of the subprime lending that many of the others
banks did,” he said. “So I think we are starting at a better place,
but it is really all about getting back to basics and telling
customers that the bank is stable
“It is a huge point of differentiation.”
Rosen, who joins the $60bn-asset bank after 20
years of experience in bank marketing, drew on his work in the now
JPMorgan Chase-owned Washington Mutual (WaMu).
“With the demise of WaMu, there is a huge
vacuum left in the market,” Rosen said. “There is no bank
that has stepped in, with the types of products that we offered at
WaMu or the brand positioning that WaMu held. One of things we are
evaluating now is whether that is a vacuum we want to fill.”
Since JPMorgan Chase’s acquisition of WaMu at
the end of 2008 as the weight of the financial crisis began to take
hold, Rosen said there was evidence customers were not happy with
Chase and were moving.
“We are benefiting from that. I know from
having worked in WaMu, that Chase is a very different bank, it has
got a very different culture,” he said.
The bank has anecdotal evidence of a lift
in new account openings and a general boost in volumes that can be
tracked alongside some of the mergers in the market.
Attractive alternative
The disruption in the market has
bolstered the bank’s image as a more attractive alternative to the
large corporations, according to Rosen.
But he was cautious to downplay the bank’s
marketing power alongside the US giants it places itself against,
identifying challenges ahead.
“We are competing with the large national banks
and they are spending 100 times more than us in terms of
marketing,” he said.
“I have a very limited budget that has got to
cover our entire footprint so I try to do everything on the cheap.
We are not playing on a level playing field so everything I do
needs to break through and make a big impact.”
To put Bank of the West’s marketing investment
pool into perspective, Rosen said one of the bank’s big competitors
spends more in one of its target markets in one month than Bank of
the West’s entire annual budget.
“The banks we are competing with are actually
much larger and throwing vast resources into capturing some of our
key markets.”
Rosen identified the youth as the next target
customer segment for the bank, after acknowledging that most of its
customers have a longer tenure with the bank and therefore skew to
the older age range.
The bank has already begun leveraging its
products and services to the so-called ‘Generation Y’ consumer with
the launch of PopMoney – a person-to-person payments service
provided by CashEdge.
Although a raft of other banks have launched a
P2P service in recent months, the latest being US Bank, Rosen
dismissed claims it was a threat to Bank of the West gaining market
share.
“Any bank can implement this type of
technology. For us technology is one piece of the puzzle,” Rosen
said.
Online advertising is also at the top of the
agenda in terms of attracting a younger demographic, with various
fan sites set up to attract customer feedback and interaction.
While many banks around the world have
sponsored tennis tournaments, no banking group has supported tennis
with quite the enthusiasm of BNP Paribas.
Its California subsidiary has also got in on
the act, sponsoring the Bank of the West Classic tournament, with
over 1,000 tennis fans already signed up to a website tied to the
event.
But Rosen was cautious on putting too much
emphasis on social media sites such as Facebook.
“My theory is that consumers aren’t really
interested in being friends with a bank – it is not really
exciting. But what we have done is set up a fan site for some of
the community events that we offer,” Rosen said.
