Northern Bank Sell Products

Hands up who has gone to a bank to get a product?  Not many hands I’m guessing.  In this current Northern Bank above the line campaign they have used the strapline “New Charity Savings Products”.

In common parlance bank customers (like me) don’t talk about our savings products, we talk about our savings accounts.  We view the bank as a service provider not a product supplier.  Internally within the bank, when talking about customers and how the bank can sell their services they tie up a list of services and refer to them as a product.

The problem with this campaign is that the Northern Bank has used internal corporate language and assumed that its customers do the same.   The very worthy charity co-sponsoring the campaign wouldn’t write, “Donor Products For Sale” if it was looking for sponsorship – that would be an internal phrase.

It’s not easy to make marketing truly customer centric but in order to be effective an agency and marketing department need to look at it from the customer perspective.

This is particularly true on the web.  It is your customers who dictate the language they use to link and search for you.  Just ask those organisations who waited for people interested in climate change, only to see their target audience search for global warming.  Or those who promoted satellite navigation, and waited in vain for customers whilst the market searched for satnav, or the the low fares airlines whose customers wanted cheap flights.

In a busy world falling over itself with white noise, you get nanoseconds of opportunity to connect with your customers.  Don’t miss the chance by talking in a language they don’t understand.