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I See
Part One of a 5-part Series on Multi-Sensory Branding & Marketing

It's the beginning of a new quarter. You find yourself tucked in a hot, stuffy room with your bank's top-level executives, telling them all about your vision for the bank's brand; painting a vivid picture of how your masterfully crafted campaign will take the bank to that branding promise land. Right on cue, someone sits up and asks the inevitable: “So, what will it look like?”

Good question. But there are four more that should follow it.

Imagine this: you walk into a small shop downtown. But this time, it's different: you're blindfolded. You can't see a thing—not a logo, piece of furniture or product. You can, however, hear, smell and touch. Your ears quickly identify the sweet sound of Ray Charles telling you how he's got Georgia on his mind, with a foreground of lively chatter. As you fumble around with your hands, you feel several display racks and tables around you, filled with what you can tell is ceramic and stainless steel dish ware. Your nose enjoys an aroma with a fresh, rich scent of roasted perfection. It turns out the blindfold isn't slowing you down at all—you know exactly where you are, before the barista even asks if you need room for cream.

Now take off the blindfold. No surprises here—you're standing in the middle of Starbucks...and in the middle of one of the best examples of multi-sensory marketing found anywhere.

Leading marketers have long since discovered that the strongest brands can be not only seen, but smelled, tasted, heard and touched. Yet most bank marketers have remained focused solely on sight alone—the way the brand looks visually. In this five-part series, we will examine how leading brand innovators both within and outside of the financial industry are building deeper, more differentiated brands by consciously building brand equity into all five senses, thereby creating a powerful, one-of-a-kind experience for customers, employees, the community and beyond. These multi-sensory experiences not only tell a bank's story, they prove it with real action.

Why It Makes 'Sense' To Your Bank
Whether you're a retail bank or maintain low-traffic offices that primarily serve commercial accounts, at least one thing is common: your customers are people, not companies. And people love things they can interact with—and interactions are touched, heard, smelled, tasted and seen.

As if genuinely engaging customers weren't enough, multi-sensory marketing and experiential brand development offer several other key benefits to marketers as well.

Secondly, it's cost effective. Multi-sensory marketing is much more about thoughtful brand strategy than gigantic execution. Consider the cost of your latest traditional mass media campaign. Plenty of dollars, no doubt. Now compare that to the cost of keeping your branch stocked with freshly sharpened #2 pencils (their distinct and pleasant cedar scent, and relevance to your financial business to boot), choosing a more brand-appropriate fabric (is your brand more vinyl leather or swanky suede?) for your new office chairs, and concluding each transaction with a piece of bubble gum. Go ahead, do the math.

Third, multi-sensory marketing simply goes further. Your traditional media efforts are called “campaigns” for a reason. True experiential branding, however, lasts longer—it's not a one-time ad or other gimmicks. It's a reflection of what your brand truly stands for, communicated using all the senses. As a result, it's never outdated.

But the biggest benefit is that multi-sensory marketing demonstratively substantiates your bank as one-of-a-kind. It creates a unique suite of signature touches that cannot be replicated by a competitor. Your ad copy can be plagiarized; your website virtually replicated. But the unique blend of experiences you create are personalized signature touches. And there's only one you.

Insight Into Sight
Bank marketers have admittedly focused most of their brand-building efforts on sight—the visual expression of the brand and its story. Even so, master brand marketers both inside and outside the financial sector offer many lessons for improvement in utilizing this critical sense.

The first brand rule of sight is that your bank's look goes beyond a logo identity, color palette, and typography. While these are critical, the equity you build into sight should incorporate the way your bank's employees appear, the way a branch environment looks, and the way seemingly insignificant items like loan applications and ink pens look.

Decisions of how the brand will look should never be made without first consulting the brand's core. Whether it's a sales brochure or Website, the visual composition of all materials must be relevant to the brand. As with all of the senses, sight is not about your people, branches and tools looking nice. Any competitor can also make theirs look nice. Rather, it's about visually making them looking relevant to your unique brand. For example, if your brand is about friendliness, that perfectly tied necktie on your teller might look nice, but an intentionally loosened knot may be a more relevant way to prove that unique story.

Apple is a superb example of visual design excellence in servicing the brand. From the company's clean, simple logo and innovative, user-friendly products to the inviting “try before you buy” experience stores, Apple clearly understands the importance of a consistently experiential brand executed carefully not only visually, but beyond.

Unpeeling ING
Not long ago, ING made waves (not to mention bankers everywhere nervous) with its eye-popping online deposit account rates to customers seemingly more interested in high yields than brick and mortar service. Today, however, ING is making financial brand marketers take notice not only for the rates, but for their creation of a powerful, multi-sensory brand.

Realizing the great potential to capitalize on their recent successes and further prove their brand's story—not just tell it online—ING created heavily merchandised retail locations called “cafes” that more than anything, sell the brand they began online.

ING has built a great deal of visual equity into two aesthetic elements: the color orange, and the circle. Nearly everything in an ING cafe supports this, by simply being orange, round or both.

Peering Into Umpqua Bank
A much noted brand in the banking sector and beyond, Umpqua Bank is an excellent example of several multi-sensory marketing successes—not the least of which involves sight. For instance, Umpqua Bank's recently introduced neighborhood store concept was visually designed to permanently infuse itself into the fabric of the community, as a means of proving its community bank story.

For Umpqua, these very small store environments offer unique visual opportunity tailored to the neighborhood. Every square inch is dedicated to using sight (among other senses) to align the bank branch with the unique neighborhood it resides in.

Prideful wall messaging that describes the neighborhood, a large tabletop display filled with merchandise from local retailers, and a dark-stained wood bar area adorned with issues of Inc. or Gourmet magazines where customers surf the Internet and bank all work in unison to visually prove their story.

Capitalizing on the Sense of Sight
The key to making the most of your sight opportunities is to visually express your bank's brand everywhere possible—and do it in unique, conceptual ways.

Repeatedly ask yourself the question “According to my unique brand, what should my _____ look like?” Fill in the blank with everything: chairs, pens, employees, brochures and door handles. Your values, your brand's personality, and its mission statement should all point you in the right direction. In the world of branding, no decision is arbitrary. Each item can either prove or disprove your story.

Your branch environment is but one of many places your brand's look should live. If you can, package your bank's brand and allow customers to take the experience home with tangible visual merchandise.

Empower everyone within your company to be downright tyrannical in upholding your “sight” standards. Protect the look of your bank and allow your employees to police themselves. Whether it's following the corporate font guidelines or questioning why stainless steel mugs were chosen over ceramic ones, all employees should know and understand how and why your brand looks like it does. Just because you can purchase ultra-cheap stock privacy brochures, doesn't mean you should—doing what's easy but irrelevant will diminish your brand visually.

Building Equity in the Other Four Senses
As you take steps to ensure your brand is proven visually, stay tuned for upcoming articles about how the most forward-thinking banks and other companies also use sound, touch, taste and smell to create experiences that drive customer loyalty.

Remember, the goal is to become truly remarkable (definition: being worthy of talking about), and to create loyal fans who spread your message authentically because they genuinely want to, not because they have to.

The next installment will explain the sense of smell and how creating a positive, relevant scent that people associate with your brand puts the “action” in “olfaction.” Until then, keep everyones' eyes focused on your brand.

About the Author
Jeff Stephens is CEO and Brand Director of Creative Brand Communications, a Portland-Oregon based multi-sensory and experiential brand development agency. The agency features two former members of the Umpqua Bank marketing team, including Jeff himself.

Click here for the PDF version of this article, as it appears in ABA Bank Marketing

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