Flickr.com, CCL, m4man

This is the fifth and final part of the “Bank Branding Series”. Please click here if you want to be taken to the first post of the series.

According to Catherine Shafer on “Slides and Slippers”:

“A brand is a promise wrapped in an experience.

It is a promise made to your employees, your customers, your investors, your vendors and suppliers. A promise implies that a trust between two entities has been established. Expectations and a sense of security or reliability grow from that trust. Break a promise and you destroy a relationship.

Thus the experience anyone has with your organization must reflect your promise. Every experience, every time. This is at the heart of marketing your organization, company, even yourself.”

Where most marketers focus on the customer side of things, her definition puts everything in perspective: you cannot deliver a realistic brand promise by devoting all your attention to a single target audience. The degree to which you can successfully engage your suppliers and – especially – your employees with your brand will have a strong impact on the amount of brand advocacy you will ultimately reach with your clients.

Meanwhile, keeping your promises goes both ways: people are extremely wary of others (companies, individuals, …) who do not live up to their word and deliver on the expectations we have of them. Unfortunately, it is my experience that companies are not always equally great at following up on the expectations that they create with their employees and customers. For a refreshing take on this, check out the video below.

Ultimately, a company is a collective of individuals working towards a common goal. The problem is that the goal can be different, and at times elusive, depending on who you talk to. Shareholders, senior management, employees and customers may have different goals in mind when thinking about organisation goals.

Case in point: the current crisis of confidence is due, at least in part, to the differing expectations various stakeholder audiences had of financial institutions in the past. As shareholders, we were looking for superior and long-lasting (ever-lasting ?) returns on our investment. As senior management and employees, we were looking for challenging careers with an above average paycheck. As customers, we were looking for a safe haven for our hard-earned cash. That promise was not kept.

Today, as most of the commotion around banks fades away, the slight undertone of wariness remains: many seem to feel there are still some surprises to come, and feel reluctant to start investing again. Undoubtedly, it will take some time for the financial industry’s image to recover fully from recent events. 

In the meantime, it remains to be seen how the massive level of government support will “change the rules of the game” for those that remain. Will banks find themselves confronted with new regulations and requirements in order to better serve the public good ? Will the drive for profit be tempered by a focus on good social citizenship and providing valuable services to society at large ?

It will be interesting to see what the “new deal” will be, and how the promises that financial institutions make to their customers will continue to shift in the aftermath of what has been called “the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression”.