For the last year, I and MESH Experience have been working to collect and analyse data across the full spectrum of what people experience about UK retail banking brands - all paid, owned, and earned touchpoints.
This Real-Time Experience Tracking provides unique quantitative and qualitative insight into what works, what doesn’t, and why. It goes way beyond retrospective recall; this is real takeout, in the moment stuff. And that’s a fairly cool approach, because it means you get a good approximation of how customers really see a brand.
Layered onto this, we’ve collectively developed an approach to classify experiences (like campaigns) according to what people take out. From deep-seated, purpose-based cultural affinity that sticks; through to more fleeting hedonic messaging that may amuse in the short term, but slide quickly away.
This feels increasingly relevant, because the big players seem to be converging on a positioning/purpose that’s all about ‘helping customers thrive/advance/grow together.’ Of course they express it differently, but the theme is the same: in short, in some way helping people achieve fulfilment, which the Greeks called ‘Eudaimonia’. Laudable, we dare say - but how does this play out in reality?
At the MRS Media Research Summit I presented a (hopefully!) insightful review of the significant retail banking campaigns of the last 12 months. All set in context of the full variety of touchpoints that affect peoples’ feelings about a brand one way or the other (TV; out of home; negative news; friendly staff; branch closures; social media; seamless banking apps, and so on). And most importantly, how these touchpoints work together – or sometimes against.
I shared how Lloyds’ 250 years of horses really stacks up against Barclays’ scary fraud lady, HSBC’s ‘global citizen’ work, Halifax’s retro cartoons, TSB’s cat-based challenge to the Big Five - and much, much more.