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NAB repositions saying life is about More than Money

Five years after throwing a hand grenade at its rivals with its award winning Break Up campaign, NAB is repositioning its messaging to focus firmly on consumers.

NAB strap

In its first major brand reset since it launched More Give, Less Take six years ago, the bank said it wanted to show how it was supporting customers in their lives, an attitude framed in the line “More than Money”

The campaign is the first articulation of the bank’s future direction under chief marketing officer Andrew Knott, who joined from McDonald’s last year. He told Mumbrella it is a platform the bank hopes will sustain its communications over the next “five to 10 years”.

The campaign launches with two TV ads featuring real NAB customers and centres on the emotional drivers that lead them to seek out bank services and the rational facts about money.

One features home movie footage of a young woman from the day of her birth through to her eighteenth birthday, while the second, aimed at small business owners, charts the course of a NAB business customer from his start up days through to taking his business international.

NAB FishermanKnott said the campaign was about bringing to life the One NAB proposition of the bank, aiming to become the best financial institution in Australia and New Zealand and the renewed focus on customers.

“For us this is really an opportunity to really reset around what’s important, what we believe we’re best at out of the big four banks and say it in a way that is very believable for our customers,” Knott said.

“What are they trying to achieve, how are they feeling and what role do we play in their life?” Knott said.

“It was quite obvious to me that in an organisation that clearly puts the customers at the centre of what we do, and Andrew Thorburn when he came in as CEO, made it very clear that he was measuring customer advocacy as one of the crititcal success measures for the business as a whole.

It’s reflecting the role that the bank plays in their life more accurately.”

The More than Money approach will roll out through TV and will have a significant social and digital aspect, using platforms such as Twitter to highlight how money is just a conduit to the real things that matter to people, such as a home not a house, or a child spending their “life savings” on a treat.

NAB Tweet“People don’t set out to have a million dollars in their bank account, they set out to be able to do the things they want to do,” Knott said.

“For me, what success (of this campaign) looks like is when our customers realise that we’re there to assist them, where they believe that we want to be as good with people as we are with money and they see that relationship as a positive one to continue to build.”

While NAB has been using a range of creative approaches through its agency, Clemenger BBDO Melbourne – most recently a campaign using archaeological digs to promote its retirement products – the new campaign marks a significant shift from the aggressive approach it was taking against rivals with The Breakup and More Give, Less Take.

He said by featuring real people and real customers, it was the best way to shift the focus from competitors to consumers.

“The guy fishing is a NAB customer, an agri-business customer and he does genuinely spend his weekends fishing to get away from the challenges of his daily life,” he said.

Likewise, he said that the decision to feature the young girl was aimed at trying to get the message to the difficult to reach millennials market.

While he would not say how long the campaign was slated to run he did say it would have a high profile.

“We are obviously investing very heavily in landing the new line because that sits above everything.

“It allows us to do two things, it allows us to get down into more specific product communication, but also to use an old expression, it’s campaignable- we believe this new brand expression has life.

The intention is for this to continuously evolve over the next five to ten years.”

The campaign features 182 different creative elements from TV and traditional media through to “very deep investment in all aspects of digital from display through to snackable content”.

It will also have more immersive content that people can engage with when they have more time such as when commuting on the train.

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