Dear Bankers - feelings make bank

Tapping into emotions and driving positive ones through addictively delightful interactions- pays. That’s why you need to be a brand. No seriously, I know I’ve been repeating this like a broken record over the past years but it most certainly does.

There are three areas where the connection between customer’s feelings and their shopping behaviour becomes most evident. Areas where the Rational Consumer is but Myth.

TECHNOLOGY PRODUCTS AND SERVICES

Recent research shows that the way we relate to technology and its digital manifestation has drastically changed over the past few years. We started our pre-digital relationship to technology by perceiving it as an objective enabler for various goals with practical benefits. Now-a-days technology translates into an instant appraisal of how it can “express and enhance who I am” – an emotional goal touching on motivation and needs.

CONSUMER GOODS

Nowhere is the connection more surprising than in purchasing decisions when it comes to everyday goods. Dr. P.N. Murray and his team found that:

“...consumers’ beliefs about a brand’s personality are based primarily on their interpretation of its “story” – the narrative expressed in communication, packaging, and other marketing elements. The narrative communicates what the brand means to them … the emotional connection. It is this connection that makes consumers loyal to brands."

LUXURY BRANDS

We all know that luxury items are maybe the most emotional of purchases with no reason to buy a Tesla versus a Mercedes SLK beyond the fact that it intrinsically appeals to our aspirations and sense of self.

This new research also uncovered subconscious reasons behind each aspirational purchase decision

“unconscious perceptions about a brand’s authenticity and timelessness – what consumers describe as its “truth.” These perceptions evoke emotions – the sense of trust and security that is the essence of luxury for consumers.”

If you’re in banking and quickly scrolled down to see if Financial Services was listed only to let out a sigh of relief not to see it I would suggest it’s time you hold that breath and look up again because no matter how much we may not like to admit it, banking is part consumer goods, part luxury and it’s all underpinned by technology and digital products so all of this, the irrationality of consumers, their need for an emotional connection is highly relevant to us.

So Mr (or, sadly far more unlikely, Mrs) Banker let me ask you this: do you know how your CBBE (Consumer Based Brand Equity) pyramid compares to that of Levi’s, Amazon’s or Google’s? Does your bank have one? Shall we grab someone from the Customer Behaviour team and ask, maybe a Neuromarketing expert? Does your bank know what it is?

I’d wager the answer is “no, no, who?!? and no” because we’ve already established banks do not lift one finger to become a brand. In their defence there was no need – if they did not build delightful experiences and expressed their story and “truth” then what? What would the consumer do? Go to the next non-delightful-devoid-of-truth bank? The reality of it is that while there’s ample safety in numbers and banks can continue to abuse its consumers by withholding delight some of them have where to go now. And the places they go to will fundamentally have built an identity and the type of strong brand that will make people join them and fall in love with them hence buy from them

While we struggle to understand why we should even put the consumer truly at the centre of what we build in retail, private banking and wealth made some –timid- steps in researching emotions and some studies such as this and this have been surfacing. That’s because they care, they want to make money.

That 1 point change in mortgage rates you debated for 3 months won’t move the needle. The 0.02 higher savings offer or the 100 quid signing bonus won’t make anyone a loyal, invested customer because your premise doesn’t work. It’s not about the numbers, it’s about the feelings. That’s what pays.

No matter how much denial they invest in it and how many times they roll their eyes at the urgency to understand and act on Emotional Banking, retail banking will have to stop avoiding the issue, rip off stifling culture to inject experience design into the DNA as a sine qua non technology enabler, and become a loved brand, as opposed to just paying customer centricity lip service sometime very soon.