When The National Bank and ANZ were combined all of their banking products and services changed. It was the largest, most complex project of its type ever undertaken in New Zealand – and had to be delivered in just 7 months with no margin for error. In this video Mike Cunnington, Head of Marketing at ANZ, discusses this massive project and answers the key questions behind the branding decision and system amalgamation.
Transcript:
We’re at the start of a pretty big journey at ANZ in New Zealand with brining the National Bank and ANZ brands together, as well as bringing the two operating systems and platforms of the two banks together.
It’s been a good project to be involved with. It’s been a couple years in the making from probably 2 years of lots PowerPoint’s and thinking about branding strategies.
I always felt as an organization we were asking the wrong question – we kept asking ourselves intellectually is one brand, or two brands or nineteen thousand brands better?
And as an intellectual answer you’re probably always going to fall down to multi-brand. But it’s totally the wrong question.
The question really was, as a business what is the strategy we are going to execute best? What is the strategy that is in the medium term going to be commercially the most successful for the organization?
Which comes down to; what can you execute best?
And once we finally realized that was the question I think we quite quickly came to the answer. That for us, as an organization, we are best placed to execute a single brand strategy.
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In terms of putting the 2 systems together, that’s actually been a different sort of problem. That was a problem of the more you unraveled the more complex the piece of work became.
It is the biggest technology project in New Zealand this century. You’ve got two systems, some of which have modules that date back to the previous century, and you’re trying to map and understand that if we do this over here what the impact might be over there?
If we change this product and these features what impact will it have on how customers actually experience the product?
So that was actually a detailed question whereas the branding question was more of an intellectual question.
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What I was always conscious of and felt our biggest challenge was: If we didn’t get our people to believe that what we were doing was in the best interest of our customers and the bank then how were we ever going to get our customers over the line?
So our biggest job was to get our people to believe that this was the right decision for us, and the right decision for our customers.
Because of the nature of continuous disclose in banking, when we finally made the decision to actually go to one brand we had to disclose that right away. So effectively we had to tell our staff and our customers and everyone at the exact same time.
So what we had to have was incredibly coordinated communication to our staff in 48hrs following the decision to answer all their questions and concerns. We had to give them all the reasons why we believed this is the right thing for our organization and our customers.
That first 48 hours were absolutely critical.
It was not scripted. it was about explaining the reasons behind the decision, not asking people to parrot those reasons to their customers but rather asking people to understand them and then articulate it back in their own words.
I believe we did quite a good job of that and for us those 48 hours were really critical.
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