Rabobank the Bank for Adulterers?

June 2006

Years after ASB Bank proved that humour and liveliness could be successfully used for bank advertising, the rest of the banking industry has finally caught up.

These campaigns’ success has arisen through a realization that banking advertising no longer has to adhere to traditional expectations of what banking advertisements ‘should’ be.  Yes, banks need to imbue feelings of trust, solidity, and respect, but the days of Len Cheeseman’s BNZ kiwiana tributes are long gone.  It appears that New Zealand banks have simply decided that their name and longevity in the market should be enough to communicate trust immediately – so the ads are free to develop real personality.

For example, the BNZ pigs could feasibly be for any number of brands, banking or otherwise.  For many marketers this fact could be deemed a failure of the advertising, but frankly, anything that can get people excited and talking about banking advertisements can’t be that bad.

The Westpac advertisements are similar to the BNZ ads in this respect – the cartoon line drawings are informal, friendly and approachable – again, not the typical hallmarks of traditional banking advertising.  They’re not as immediately likeable as the pigs, but still feel fresh after some time, and for that will probably last longer than the pigs’ novelty.

One banking brand that still has to prove its pedigree is Kiwibank, but, as with the others discussed above, they’ve been able to deliver their message in a humourous, tongue in cheek manner that would have been unheard of in the banking industry in past years.

Amongst this activity, what was once tried-and-true can only serve to look tired. The National Bank’s horse is firmly embedded with their brand, but likewise is extremely difficult to enhance.  Perhaps if Pixar could perform an equine review, there might be hope.  The ANZ campaign, whilst ground-breaking and commendable for its innovative use of real staff and location-specific billboards, still suffers from a blandness that fails to ignite much passion.  And in an age of internet and phone banking, why on earth are they encouraging people to visit branches? 

Amongst such a cluttered and changing environment, Dutch-based multinational Rabobank has recently entered the mainstream, expanding its marketing beyond the rural sector in which it specializes.  Yet unlike most of the other banks, Rabobank has publicly recognized that it’s supremely difficult to get customers to switch banks – people are more likely to swap spouses than banks, after all! It therefore stands to reason that one will be much more successful in convincing potential customers to move a little of their banking activities to Rabobank, than all of it.  So Rabobank’s allegorical usage of “having an affair” has been the cornerstone of their latest television campaign.

But this raises questions – a quick Google search will confirm for any doubter that affairs are rife in modern society, and so, by definition, there must be a significant proportion of the population who have been seriously hurt by such activities.  How these people view Rabobank’s invitations to have an affair with them cannot be positive, and so it must be said that Rabobank is ‘turning off’ a significant number of potential customers each time it runs the ad.  Nonetheless, for all the people who have been hurt by an affair, it stands to reason that there is a similarly-sized group of people who have viewed their affairs in a positive light – these people would be more likely to respond positively to Rabobank’s overtures.  The question is – does Rabobank really want to be “the bank for adulterers”?