Nedbank breaks marketing mould

Nedbank's newly launched AskOnce campaign deals head-on with one of bank customers' biggest frustrations – that of being pushed from pillar to post. Not only does Nedbank guarantee that the employee a customer first speaks to will take responsibility for getting answers or solving problems, but has put its money where its mouth by offering R50 to charity every time it doesn't live up to its promise.

Woken up

Clearly Nedbank is the first of South Africa's big banks to wake up to calls that marketers have been making for years now. That in this day and age of huge competition, global comparisons and an extremely cluttered advertising environment, companies need to move away claiming to care about customers and start making serious promises and commit themselves publicly to what will happen if those promises are not met.

While this new campaign is both brilliant in marketing terms and should go a long way to Nedbank enticing disgruntled customers away from other banks, it is not the sort of strategy that can simply be implemented and left to do its own thing.

Nedbank is going to need balls of titanium to not only keep up the momentum and the marketing high ground but also to weather a couple of predictable storms. The first being enormous pressure on staff not used to providing this level or service and far more comfortable just passing the buck. The second storm will certainly be one of general derision. Any courageous campaign of this nature inevitably draws the attention of the media and the public alike and without question we can look forward to a rash of poking fun at "asking once".

Positive ripples

Nedbank seems serious about this campaign, having taken the trouble to trade mark the logotype "AskOnce" and it hopefully isn't something that has simply been tossed into the pond to see whether any positive ripples develop.

Keeping up the momentum will be vital. From a marketing point of view, offering R50 to charity is fairly weak because it is not offering the customer some sort of direct recompense. However, one can understand any bank not wanting to go completely overboard, given the shocking levels of service that have been so much part of banking for decades. It is going to be fascinating to see whether Nedbank ups its ante and starts making more direct and substantial promises to its customers to keep this campaign alive.

Irrelevant
And whether or not this campaign works or not in the short term is actually irrelevant because the message that is going out is that at least one bank is trying to fix things and not just offering lip service.

Certainly, Nedbank needs to be applauded for the courage to take the banking bull by the horns and commit itself to its customers with such determination.

It is going to be interesting not only to see how many customers Nedbank can glean from the other banks and should this become significant, just how the other banks will react.

Certainly they will have to do something a little more credible than they are at the moment.

Will others follow?

Perhaps this Nedbank initiative will see FNB going beyond asking the rhetorical question "What can we do for you, " to which I suspect it is still waiting for an answer. And maybe Standard Bank will be forced into moving away from it completely meaningless and painfully contrived "Motivated, Inspired, Involved" which replaced the at least vaguely promising "Simpler, Better, Faster," and which seems to have left its customers "Baffled, Bewildered and Bemused."

It is abundantly clear, though, that Nedbank's top management has taken an interest in marketing which is very unusual for banks where marketing departments generally languish so far down the management hierarchy they haven't a hope in Hades of getting their bosses to commit to anything other than a continued obsession with the bottom line.