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What Flavor is Your Bank?
Part Four of a 5-part Series on Multi-Sensory Marketing

You can learn a lot about a person by sitting down together for an after-work refreshment. You place your order for a glass of the house pinot noir, and anxiously await your companion's order. You're intensely curious to see what menu item they'll opt for. After all, if they say “make it two,” it will tell you something very different about them than if they ask for an ice-cold High Life, or a decaf skinny two-shot double-pump extra hot mocha with whip.

It turns out brands are no different—each has a signature taste that reflects its unique spirit and personality. And the masterminds behind many of today's leading brands—both within and outside the banking industry—have tapped into this knowledge in order to shape the experience people have with the brand and demonstrate what their brand is all about.

On the Tip of Your Tongue
Many of the brands successfully building equity into their sense of taste offer flavor-oriented experiences in their physical environments. Williams-Sonoma, for example, is famous for preparing its custom recipes in the stores so customers can sample them. In fact, the high-end kitchen accessories retailer has become known for offering delicious, seasonal recipes on its Web site, in catalogs and in its retail stores. In 2001, the company even launched “Taste”, a travel and entertainment lifestyle magazine, as a way to further deliver on its taste-centered brand.

So can a bank have a distinguishable taste, too? Absolutely. The folks at Union National Community Bank had a flavorful idea when they unveiled their Gold Café – a hybrid of a café and a bank. The bank and café combo connects the financial services expertise of Union National Community Bank with the taste of a snack bar—essentially answering the question “What does our brand taste like?” with “It tastes like yummy snacks.”

The Lancaster, Penn.-based bank proves its story by using not only taste, but a complete experience for existing and potential bank customers. Specifically, the Gold Café caters to all customers, but is tailored to the small business community by offering free Wi-Fi and conference rooms, and staying open seven days a week.

“We want to create a remarkable experience for all our banking customers,” says Union National Community Bank’s Vice President, Marketing Manager Terry Buda. By providing small-business owners with a place to conduct business, grab a smoothie and pastry, the bank accomplishes that goal, making itself a haven for one of the bank’s most valued customer segments.

It Takes More Than Just A Taste of Relevance
As with all multi-sensory marketing efforts, brand relevance is extremely important. Answering the question “How does my brand taste?” should be done with care and strategic thought. A brand's taste should be developed based on the brand's position, personality and the ideal experience that the bank is trying to create. In other words, a marketer should not arbitrarily pick a flavor to utilize simply because it's exciting, fun or yummy. Rather, the taste concept should be selected to complement and support the experiences the bank creates using other senses as well.

For instance, a bank whose brand is about simplicity may not want to build equity into the sense of taste using wines, which are known for their complexity. Even though wines have become increasingly popular in the United States, the relevance of wines to the “simplicity” brand is low, and may in fact detract from the “simplicity” experience the bank has otherwise chosen to pursue. On the other hand, a brand positioning itself as chic and sophisticated may be well-served by leveraging wine in its taste marketing efforts.

Pacific Valley Bank, Salinas, Calif., goes as far as to blend and brew its own coffee, Pacific Valley Blend, to prove its story. According to a recent Pacific Valley Bank news release, the introduction of a custom blend of coffee underscores the bank’s commitment to custom service for its business and retail customers. “One big difference between a large bank with dozens of branches in many markets and a local, community bank like Pacific Valley Bank is that we don’t try to pigeonhole customers into off-the-shelf financial products,” claims Pacific Valley Bank's President and CEO Bob Wheeler. “We customize bank products to meet the individual needs of our customers. We could serve customers any brand of coffee or any generic loan product, but we prefer to offer something that is unique to our bank.”

In other words, it's not just coffee that the bank has aligned with, it's the taste of custom-blended coffee that identifies what the Pacific Valley Bank brand stands for.

Relating Taste to Other Senses
Taste is not only a strong sensory brand tool by itself, it is also closely tied to other senses such as smell and sight. For companies like Pacific Valley Bank, the custom blend of coffee can also be leveraged into the sense of smell—customers can associate both the signature taste and aroma of coffee with the bank.

Similarly, taste can also be connected with sight to create brand synergy. In the case of Union National Bank, the Gold Cafe is not only a channel for delivering on the bank's sense of taste, it's an opportunity to create an entire visual system centered around the elements people associate with cafes. This gives the bank the opportunity to integrate a visual cafe-oriented concept into the design of marketing materials, the colors used throughout the branch environment, and more.

Offer a Doggy Bag
Brand tastes need not be limited to in-branch experiences. In fact, successful bank brands have equity that extends outside the boundaries of the bank's own premises, marketing materials or Web site. As with any brand touch-point, if you can package your brand and allow customers to take it home with them, you've achieved a whole new level of brand engagement.

From our friends across the pond, Lloyds Bank in London used a unique and tasty strategy to prove its story and build taste-equity into its brand. The bank developed an innovative door-drop to over 3.5 million households, using tea bags to promote its personal loan offering. The door-drop was designed to communicate the speed and ease with which Lloyds Bank's personal loans can be arranged. The front of the pack, where the tea bag is attached, reads “put the kettle on …and we’ll give you an answer on a loan before you finish your cup.”

Paul Hyde from Lloyd Bank’s personal lending department said, “By drawing a parallel between the time it takes to make a cup of tea and the time in which Lloyds can arrange a loan we think we’ve found an interesting way of communicating the convenience and speed with which our loans can actually be arranged.” Now that’s a savory idea.

Similarly, at Pacific Valley Bank, the brand's taste-tie with coffee extends outside the branch, too. To leave an extra good taste in Pacific Valley Bank's customers’ mouths, the bank gives a package of coffee and a custom coffee mug free to new checking customers when they open a personal or business checking account.

As recent creative marketers have demonstrated, taste is also a powerful tool for marketing products and services to noncustomers. In Europe, for instance, Haagen Dazs found a unique and creative way to market its signature taste by integrating its flavors into an every day action of its potential customers: licking stamps. The ice cream maker joined forces with the Austrian Postal Service to develop a series of ice cream-flavored stamps, including cookies and cream, macadamia nut brittle, and strawberry cheesecake. Not only did Haagen Dazs cleverly market its products, the postal service leveraged the ice cream maker's brand to sell more stamps. Tastefully brilliant.

Next Issue: Getting Touchy Feely. You don't have to be AT&T to let your brand reach out and touch someone. Strong experiential brands have a signature feel. We'll explore how leading companies are using the sense of touch to build equity into their brands.

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