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Bendigo Bank reveals refreshed branding, designed to appeal to a younger customer base

Bendigo Bank has revealed its refreshed branding.

Speaking to Mumbrella, Bendigo Bank’s executive for partnerships, marketing and corporate affairs, Alexandra Gartmann, said that the decision to refresh the brand came from an increase in new and young customers.

The new branding was devised to reflect Bendigo Bank’s contemporary positioning

“Because of the sentiment in the market and also some of our uplift in performance recently with really great numbers of new and younger customers coming to the bank, we decided it was a great time as part of our strategy to really tell our story in a different way,” Gartmann said.

“This is enabling us to modernise or refresh, bring a new element of professionalism and capability to our brand that is already really well known for being deeply connected with community and having a very strong element of care.”

The new branding, complete with a new logo, font, colour palette, imagery and tone of voice, was determined to better reflect the brand’s contemporary positioning and client base, the bank said. The double B logo is intended to “represent the brand’s care and capability”.

Gartman said: “We know that this new look resonates the most with the under 29 cohort, so we believe that, again, looking to the future, targeting the next generation of customers is critically important.

“We’ve seen a recent uplift in customer numbers in that cohort, and we’re also seeing really quite solid growth in our new-to-bank customers when more broadly, the market is quite flat.

“So that’s telling us that people are interested and by modernising and, and refreshing our look so that it is a more attractive proposition to investigate further. For that demographic, we believe that we can double down on success.”

In its interim results announced in February, Bendigo Bank reported a 4.9% uplift in customer numbers over the last half year. The average age of new customers at Bendigo Bank is 10 years younger than the average age of the existing customer base.

Bendigo Bank’s previous branding

The refreshed brand was developed by AJF GrowthOps. When speaking to Mumbrella, Gartmann praised AJF for being an “exceptional partner”.

“AJF GrowthOps are the agency partner that have worked with us on this brand refresh. And whilst Forethought helped us with the research and the evidence side of things, AJF has been an exceptional partner in bringing a degree of capability and creativity to our team. And I really have to acknowledge the exceptional work that they’ve done with us,” she said.

AJF GrowthOps executive creative director, Andrew Foote, said in a statement: “It’s been a privilege to work on redesigning such a highly trusted brand steeped in heritage. With a modernised logo, typeface and colour palette, we’ve evolved the look and feel to reflect Bendigo Bank’s trusted position as a caring and capable financial service provider, who take a simple, straightforward approach to banking.”

The brand platform developed by AJF in 2018, ‘The Better Big Bank’, which was designed to position the financial institution as a direct competitor of the big four, will continue in Bendigo Bank’s upcoming advertising.

Gartmann said the the platform will evolve throughout the year.

“I certainly think that there’s a lot of ways that we can evolve that for different segments in our market and different products that we’re offering,” Gartmann said.

“Ensuring that we can now bring our new look and that new tone of voice, different imagery and the colour palette will actually help to – it’s essentially refreshing and bringing a different look and feel into the market for people to just get that different thought trigger that Bendigo Bank has appropriate scale, it has the capability to meet people’s needs, and it does good with the profits that are generated from the business.”

She went on to say that in light of the recent natural disasters across Australia, it was important to for the bank to communicate its strength and solidarity with affected customers and communities.

“People are looking for a financial institution that can bring that capability component, which we’re really driving in the refreshed brand, but also that connection to community and investing in the prosperity of communities.”

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