Roar discreetly, lion
Bank Leu is making a bold statement to boost its image with the king of the animals
Bank Leu boosts its image boldly with the king of the animalsBy Luca Aloisi Despite the stock market blues and the tarnished image of holding company Credit Suisse: Zurich-based Bank Leu is proudly showing off its marketing claws again, while its competitors continue to slow down their advertising spending.
Even the most discreet among the discreet in the financial sector have been facing a rough economic wind for some time now. As a result, the list of mergers and cooperations among private banks and private bankers is getting longer and longer, as the latest examples show: the Geneva banking marriage between Lombard Odier and Darier Hentsch or the "alliance" between Sarasin and the Dutch Rabobank.
Parallel to the concentration process, which was intensified at the end of the nineties by the massive entry of big banks into private banking, the communication effort of private banks has increased. The corporate culture of noble restraint had to be gently introduced to competitive marketing strategies.
The abandonment of the convention of the Groupement des banquiers privés in 1999 was one of the key factors in this change. Until then, the Geneva members had undertaken not to advertise on their own behalf, but only to conduct selective collective image campaigns.
Simon Roth, Head of Corporate Communications and Press Spokesman at Pictet, Zurich, knows that investment in communication has increased significantly across the industry since then. "However," he qualifies, "we don't find our clients through traditional advertising, but through referral business."
Networking - the most important communication tool
In fact, according to the latest half-year figures from Media Focus, private banks have relatively modest advertising expenditure. Moreover, they have fallen sharply in the current year - to CHF 4.4 million. In 2001, gross advertising expenditure amounted to around CHF 13 million. (For comparison: UBS invested around 12 million in traditional advertising in the first six months of 2002, 32.6% less than in the same period of the previous year).
However, the strengths of private banks, such as personal communication and individuality combined with continuity, can only be visualized to a limited extent in traditional advertising media. In addition, the scatter loss in these channels would be far too high. Although branding has also gained in importance as a differentiation tool in this banking segment, Jürg Stähelin, Director of Bank Julius Baer, believes that the way the target group is addressed has only changed marginally. Word of mouth and networking have remained the most proven means of acquiring potential new customers and retaining existing customers in the secretive financial sector, despite the increasingly fierce competition.
With the exception of the fund business, where end consumers are addressed directly with advertising, the private networking of each employee is by far the most important and efficient communication tool at Pictet, says Simon Roth, spokesman for Switzerland's largest private bank. Patronage plays a greater role at Pictet than event marketing or sponsorship, he adds.
The latter also play an insignificant role in the marketing strategy of Zurich's private banks. This is also the case at Bank Vontobel, which is one of the big spenders in the sector thanks to its image, column advertisements with photo portraits of employees and its regular service, the quote window.
Elisabeth Meyerhans, Head of Corporate Communications at the Vontobel Group: "We hardly do any traditional sponsoring. Our main shareholder, the charitable Vontobel Foundation, also supports many projects in the cultural sector as a traditional patron." She is convinced that event marketing and sponsoring contribute less to visibility and brand awareness. More successful in this respect are the foundation's commitments and name-dropping in market analyses and financial reporting, which have become a general topic of conversation with the share culture.
Bank Leu emerges from the CS shadow
Zurich-based Bank Leu - number 9 among Swiss private banks with CHF 29.1 billion in client assets in private banking - has taken a new approach to image communication. For half a month now, it has been appearing in major business publications and other media in German- and French-speaking Switzerland with an advertising campaign developed by the agency Matter & Partner.
"What could be more obvious than to use the most plausible symbol of all for a concise presentation of Bank Leu and thus secure not only attention but also brand recognition?", CD Daniel Matter explains the implementation idea of his campaign. For Nicole Brandes, Head of Marketing at Bank Leu, the new campaign is "an expression of our business strategy focused on private banking". The bank, which will soon be 250 years old, is thus catching up on the identity process.
Bank Leu's problem was that its advantages - manageable size, independence thanks to its own research and central location in Zurich - were not communicated consistently enough. In conjunction with the positioning headlines, the popular lion not only appeals to the brain, but also to the emotions.
The advertisements radiate "discreet self-confidence" and give the brand a new face. "Because the target groups are becoming increasingly heterogeneous and the 'typical private banking client' no longer exists, we have defined the target audience more broadly and thus also addressed the general public," explains Brandes. However, interpreting the proud appearance as a reaction to the calamities of the holding parent company CS would be going too far. However: "With the change in the market environment, the framework conditions have also become tighter for us. We are keeping our marketing plan correspondingly restrictive," says Nicole Brandes. On the other hand, the industry-wide reduction in advertising spending has had the positive side effect of attracting additional attention to the campaign.
Even the most discreet among the discreet in the financial sector have been facing a rough economic wind for some time now. As a result, the list of mergers and cooperations among private banks and private bankers is getting longer and longer, as the latest examples show: the Geneva banking marriage between Lombard Odier and Darier Hentsch or the "alliance" between Sarasin and the Dutch Rabobank.
Parallel to the concentration process, which was intensified at the end of the nineties by the massive entry of big banks into private banking, the communication effort of private banks has increased. The corporate culture of noble restraint had to be gently introduced to competitive marketing strategies.
The abandonment of the convention of the Groupement des banquiers privés in 1999 was one of the key factors in this change. Until then, the Geneva members had undertaken not to advertise on their own behalf, but only to conduct selective collective image campaigns.
Simon Roth, Head of Corporate Communications and Press Spokesman at Pictet, Zurich, knows that investment in communication has increased significantly across the industry since then. "However," he qualifies, "we don't find our clients through traditional advertising, but through referral business."
Networking - the most important communication tool
In fact, according to the latest half-year figures from Media Focus, private banks have relatively modest advertising expenditure. Moreover, they have fallen sharply in the current year - to CHF 4.4 million. In 2001, gross advertising expenditure amounted to around CHF 13 million. (For comparison: UBS invested around 12 million in traditional advertising in the first six months of 2002, 32.6% less than in the same period of the previous year).
However, the strengths of private banks, such as personal communication and individuality combined with continuity, can only be visualized to a limited extent in traditional advertising media. In addition, the scatter loss in these channels would be far too high. Although branding has also gained in importance as a differentiation tool in this banking segment, Jürg Stähelin, Director of Bank Julius Baer, believes that the way the target group is addressed has only changed marginally. Word of mouth and networking have remained the most proven means of acquiring potential new customers and retaining existing customers in the secretive financial sector, despite the increasingly fierce competition.
With the exception of the fund business, where end consumers are addressed directly with advertising, the private networking of each employee is by far the most important and efficient communication tool at Pictet, says Simon Roth, spokesman for Switzerland's largest private bank. Patronage plays a greater role at Pictet than event marketing or sponsorship, he adds.
The latter also play an insignificant role in the marketing strategy of Zurich's private banks. This is also the case at Bank Vontobel, which is one of the big spenders in the sector thanks to its image, column advertisements with photo portraits of employees and its regular service, the quote window.
Elisabeth Meyerhans, Head of Corporate Communications at the Vontobel Group: "We hardly do any traditional sponsoring. Our main shareholder, the charitable Vontobel Foundation, also supports many projects in the cultural sector as a traditional patron." She is convinced that event marketing and sponsoring contribute less to visibility and brand awareness. More successful in this respect are the foundation's commitments and name-dropping in market analyses and financial reporting, which have become a general topic of conversation with the share culture.
Bank Leu emerges from the CS shadow
Zurich-based Bank Leu - number 9 among Swiss private banks with CHF 29.1 billion in client assets in private banking - has taken a new approach to image communication. For half a month now, it has been appearing in major business publications and other media in German- and French-speaking Switzerland with an advertising campaign developed by the agency Matter & Partner.
"What could be more obvious than to use the most plausible symbol of all for a concise presentation of Bank Leu and thus secure not only attention but also brand recognition?", CD Daniel Matter explains the implementation idea of his campaign. For Nicole Brandes, Head of Marketing at Bank Leu, the new campaign is "an expression of our business strategy focused on private banking". The bank, which will soon be 250 years old, is thus catching up on the identity process.
Bank Leu's problem was that its advantages - manageable size, independence thanks to its own research and central location in Zurich - were not communicated consistently enough. In conjunction with the positioning headlines, the popular lion not only appeals to the brain, but also to the emotions.
The advertisements radiate "discreet self-confidence" and give the brand a new face. "Because the target groups are becoming increasingly heterogeneous and the 'typical private banking client' no longer exists, we have defined the target audience more broadly and thus also addressed the general public," explains Brandes. However, interpreting the proud appearance as a reaction to the calamities of the holding parent company CS would be going too far. However: "With the change in the market environment, the framework conditions have also become tighter for us. We are keeping our marketing plan correspondingly restrictive," says Nicole Brandes. On the other hand, the industry-wide reduction in advertising spending has had the positive side effect of attracting additional attention to the campaign.
