RBS – A BOLD NEW STRATEGY

David Wheldon, Chief Marketing Officer, RBS

In his fourth tour of duty...as a marketer and since his days at Saatchi & Saatchi, much has changed in the world of marketing according to David. The number of channels, the speed of comms and as David put it, “an awful lot of twaddle is spoken around the chambers about digital”. We heard about his bold and ambitious new strategy for the NatWest brand which launched earlier this year with a full screen strategy under the slogan: ‘We are what we do’.

Marketing strategy

It’s simple: who are you trying to target; what are you trying to say and why is it better than your competitor?

Have clear purpose and vision – for RBS this means becoming no.1 for customer service, trust and advocacy

Address your brand hierarchy. In the example of RBS, the RBS brand is not customer facing but Natwest is. The focus is now on customer-facing brands.

Voice of the customer

David took the role of CMO at RBS because he felt empowered to bring the voice of the customer into the boardroom

Listen to customers. In RBS’s case they felt the brand was like, “the patch on a sweater, it’s there but I don’t take any notice of it” – this was a key insight when developing the ‘we are what we do’ campaign.

The ‘we are what we do’ campaign had positive feedback from customers who said they felt they had been served well and were proud of the brand. Testament to this the campaign got 19k shares and 95% of the sentiment was positive