Buzz Meister

By Kenneth Cline

Marketing guru Stephen Cone says bank advertising badly needs a dose of excitement.

Is bank advertising too dull?

Stephen A. Cone certainly thinks so. Having previously worked with KeyCorp, American Express Co. and Fidelity Investments, the 53-year old Citigroup Inc. executive brings an unparalleled perspective to his assessment of the current state of bank advertising. And he doesn't like what he sees.

"Most banks don't have any excitement in their advertising," says Cone, the marketing head at Citigroup's global investment management unit. "I don't think there's any correlation between 'safe and secure' and 'dull and boring.'"

Cone, who inserted comedians Lily Tomlin and Don Rickles into Fidelity ads and built KeyCorp commercials around television star Anthony Edwards ("ER"), says financial institutions need to build brand image in both good times and bad. Differentiation from competitors requires advertisements that "create excitement," which Cone defines as inspiring enthusiasm in customers and employees alike.

While easily stated, creating a buzz around a brand or product poses a major managerial challenge. A campaign must first be sold within the company itself to energize executives and particularly front-line staff. Employees, says Cone, "are your front-line ambassadors. If they are excited, the enthusiasm will transfer to customers."

Cone is currently trying to generate this kind of enthusiasm around television ads promoting Citigroup's mutual funds. Instead of using well-known actors, he features Citigroup's own mutual fund managers, who talk about their portfolios and investment strategies.

While this campaign has generally been well received, Cone's past work has not been without controversy. The Fidelity commercials, in which Tomlin and Rickles sought investment advice from retired star money manager Peter Lynch, were panned by some industry critics as being clunky and forced.

But those complaints may be beside the point, since the commercials grabbed attention and are still talked about in the industry. In Cone's world, the worst sin is not to be noticed. Banking Strategies interviewed Cone last November during BAI's Retail Delivery conference in New Orleans.

Banking Strategies: What's the general state of advertising in financial services?

Cone: For the most part, bank advertising has been bland. The visuals have all kind of looked the same, with images of people walking on the beach, sitting in their family room or playing golf at sunset. I call these "homogenized Kodak moments." Nothing stands out. Most banks don't have any excitement in their advertising.

Banking Strategies: Isn't it important for banks to convey an image of safety and soundness?

Cone: But that doesn't mean you have to be dull and boring. I don't think there's any correlation between "safe and secure" and "dull and boring." With hundreds of television channels and publications today, it's increasingly difficult to get the consumer's attention.

Banking Strategies: Do marketing professionals such as you often have to butt heads with non-marketing executives over these kinds of issues? Is there a cultural clash?

Cone: I haven't experienced a lot of pushback on the content. When pushback occurs, it typically involves the issue of whether we can sustain the campaign in both good and bad times. Some managers might argue it's better to put marketing dollars back into the kitty, so to speak, when the business and/or economy is soft. Marketing, particularly advertising, tends to be the first line item to go. Intellectually, I actually understand that, but don't necessarily agree.

So the contentious issue is typically the ongoing commitment of dollars, not any resistance to bold ideas.

Banking Strategies: What was the state of Citigroup's brand advertising when you arrived there in February 2000? What have you done to move it in new directions?

Cone: I came to Citigroup to head up marketing for one of our business units, global investment management. Working with a number of marketing colleagues from the other business units, we had the task of making sense out of all the various brands that Citigroup encompasses, such as Citibank, Travelers and Smith Barney. At that time, the business units used different visuals, in some cases, different logos. To put it another way, there was no common brand identity across the businesses.

I was part of a group that came up with a framework that includes common visual elements across all the businesses — like the red umbrella and the blue "wave." We also use common nomenclature wherever possible. For example, the word "Citigroup" is either in the primary name of the business unit or in small type on a business card or other media to make the point that this business is part of Citigroup.

Banking Strategies: What's the role of taglines in this positioning?

Cone: Citigroup is such a large company that each major business requires its own positioning, although all of them share common visual elements. Customer groups are different, so our businesses need their own positioning and, in most cases, their own taglines.

Ideally, companies and business units, once they establish a good positioning, should keep it as singular as possible. But that isn't always possible. Following the late '90s merger between Citicorp and Travelers Corp., the combined entity's business units either developed their own taglines or continued to use a derivative of an old one. Smith Barney, for example, started out in the '80s with the famous line, "We make money the old fashioned way — we earn it." After the merger, they started using, "See how we earn it." The current variation is, "This is who we are — This is how we earn it."

Back in the '70s, Citibank used the well-known tagline, "The Citi never sleeps." That was changed in the mid-'90s, to "Where money lives." The current tagline is "Live Richly."

Banking Strategies: Any thought to reviving "The Citi never sleeps?"

Cone: There's no thought to resurrecting it. The old Citibank is now part of the new Citigroup. I wasn't around when they decided to drop that tagline, and therefore can't comment as to the thinking at the time.

Marketers, in general, often don't build properly on a company's heritage. But there are pros and cons to these issues. Sometimes you want to sound more contemporary and resonate better with what customers want today. The business of positioning and creating strong taglines is much more art than science.

Banking Strategies: What is the value of brand positioning or brand advertising in an industry where names frequently change because of acquisitions?

Cone: Brand advertising is always worthwhile because you're always competing with other institutions in local markets. Regardless of whether the brand you're marketing is going to be there forever, you still have to differentiate yourself from the local competition. If your brand name changes a few years down the road, ideally you should sustain the campaign but just use the new name.

Promoting a brand involves a lot more than advertising, by the way. It brings press attention. And it includes talking to your employees on a regular basis about what the brand stands for and how they should interact with customers. It's making sure the customer experience reinforces the brand.

If a brand is strong, the institution's name can change without too much damage.

Banking Strategies: Which is more important: advertising specific products, such as checking accounts, or promoting the overall brand image?

Cone: You can promote the brand and a product at the same time; they're not mutually exclusive. In fact, brand advertising can often promote specific products as part of the campaign. The brand advertising I've done generally promotes something. It says, "Here's company A, and here's what we're offering." In our current ads for Citigroup's private bank, for example, we talk about services such as global investment advice, generational financial planning and access to the global resources of Citigroup.

Banking Strategies: What's the optimal blend?

Cone: In most cases in financial services, you should be doing product advertising that reinforces the brand. You don't need pure brand advertising. Each major business unit should be promoting the products and services they offer in an integrated campaign.

Banking Strategies: What are the key issues in building a company's brand?

Cone: There are three elements that I always consider. The first is to create excitement in the marketplace. How do we get people excited, both employees and customers? Secondly, how do we continually create news about the products and services we're offering? And finally, how do we create a really compelling emotional connection with customers?

At the end of the day, you have to differentiate yourself from all the other guys out there who are offering very similar products and services. How do you do that visually so people immediately can understand you're different? In the case of Coca Cola, the distinction is the shape of its bottle and its logo. For Marlboro, it's the cowboy. At American Express, it's the "blue box" which says "American Express."

In the case of Citigroup's asset management business, we decided to differentiate ourselves, in all of our promotional materials, by visually showing our mutual fund managers and their investment strategies. So the promotion is focused on an individual fund manager or team of fund managers. You get to see who they are and hear them talk in their own words about their philosophy of investing. That's fairly unique in the mutual fund industry.

And I think it has worked for us. You really should know, after all, who's managing your money.

Banking Strategies: From a managerial perspective, what are the key elements in designing and implementing a campaign like that?

Cone: It's critical to get all of the senior management of the business unit heavily involved with the campaign. I want them to be part of the process, and I want and need their input.

At the end of the day, the senior management of the business needs to be comfortable, and my job is to make them comfortable. If they buy into the campaign, hopefully the rest of the employees will as well. If there are a whole lot of people who aren't comfortable, you should probably re-think the campaign.

The company's employees are going to be your warmest admirers and your severest critics all at once. I talk personally with employees at all levels, from the janitor to the CEO. And that's not just a platitude; I think that's a good way to vet an idea.

Banking Strategies: Why is it so necessary to get employees on board?

Cone: If employees are excited about a campaign, that's a good sign that consumers will be thrilled. Word of mouth is a powerful thing. If employees really like what they see, they will tell family and friends, who will tell other people.

In any business, employees should be viewed as insiders and allowed to preview everything. They're your front-line ambassadors. If they don't like your work, it's just going to sit out there with no support from them during their interaction with customers. If they are excited, the enthusiasm will transfer to customers. It's really that basic.

You can tell if the campaign is going to be good or not based on initial employee reaction. And that's true of any business, whether it's financial services or any other industry.

Banking Strategies: How much do you rely on outside experts to design these campaigns?

Cone: I don't use outside consultants much, although they're good for some things, like objective research and focus groups.

For advertising work per se, we would use an agency and try to give them as much latitude as possible to come up with creative options. In the initial phase of developing a concept for a campaign, it's always best not to hamstring the agency with all the reasons you can't do something. You can always get to that later.

Thinking outside the box is a good thing, because inside the box is where everybody else hangs out!

Banking Strategies: Have you ever encountered major resistance and had to pull back from a concept?

Cone: Well, sure. But generally, it's been in areas I had no business being in the first place.

When I was at KeyCorp, for example, I thought we should create a kind of mega branch where automotive dealers could actually display their cars and customers could get a car loan — the same with boat dealers. I also thought of putting kiosks in places like Home Depot where you could get a home equity loan.

No one else thought this was a good idea and we never did it. Sometimes marketing people — I'd bet even me — don't really spend enough time on the front lines figuring out how long it would take for these great ideas to pay back.

Banking Strategies: Looking back over your career, what marketing campaigns stand out as home runs?

Cone: The campaign at Fidelity Investments, with former fund manager Peter Lynch and actors Lily Tomlin and Don Rickles, was an across-the-board home run. Employees loved it, customers loved it and the business flourished.

At KeyCorp, promotions with actor Anthony Edwards were a huge hit and a similar success across all those constituencies, starting first with employees.

At American Express, my biggest homerun, believe it or not, involved another side of marketing: the marketing database used to create campaigns with partners of American Express. I was able to convince the technology people to move from serial processing to massive parallel processing, which allowed for a quantum leap in more efficient and effective use of that database.

Banking Strategies: Looking to the future, where do you see the best opportunities for financial services marketing?

Cone: There's an opportunity for banks in particular to get out there and talk about the concerns of baby boomers while offering financial solutions. Right now, we're letting some of the other nonbank companies do that — Fidelity and Charles Schwab & Co. come to mind. Banks are passing up a great opportunity to position themselves as offering solutions for retiring baby boomers.

Part of that has to do with a perception among consumers — and some banks themselves — that banks don't offer top-notch investment options. We certainly don't feel that way at Citigroup because we have a very strong asset management group and brokerage unit. But some other institutions might want to partner with somebody, or perhaps just make the point that they're better at this business than people think.

At the moment, however, we're letting bank competitors get way too much of this business.

Mr. Cline is senior editor of Banking Strategies.

Copyright © 2004 by Banking Strategies, published by BAI.

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