How an online community helped Santander Bank build its

brand
Stephen Whiteside
Event Reports
Argyle CMO Leadership Forum, June 2014

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How an online community helped Santander Bank build its brand

Stephen Whiteside
Event Reports
Argyle CMO Leadership Forum, June 2014

How an online community helped Santander Bank build its brand

Stephen Whiteside
Warc
Santander is a banking giant, with more than 14,000 branches and 100 million customers globally. But despite the company's
enormous scale, the success of its fledgling US business may well depend on the views of a few hundred web users spread
across the country.
Although Santander acquired Sovereign Bank, which runs 700 branches in ten (mainly Northeastern) states, in 2009, the
Spanish enterprise only officially launched its brand in America on October 17, 2013 an effort supported, among other
things, by a multimedia marketing campaign, a million square inches of carpet and 32,000 gallons of red paint.
//www.youtube.com/embed/uUM7lT0hvvE

The core contributors to the gap between purchase and brand roll out included:
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returning its newest asset to profitability;

installing an IT system to connect its branches together;

improving the inherited ATM network;

refitting stores;

introducing a new website;

building social-media capabilities;

securing the buy-in of some 9,000 employees.

But all of these achievements would have been irrelevant if the organization had not understood the needs and preferences of
US consumers. And it was here that a digital community incorporating 300 customers, as well as 300 prospects and 300 staff
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members came into play before, during and after the official rebrand.
"Our challenge was: how do you take the number-one retail financial brand in the world into the US market, where literally we
had zero brand awareness," Kathy Klingler, Santander Bank's svp/cmo, told delegates at the Argyle 2014 Chief Marketing
Officer Leadership Forum: Spotlight on Financial Services, an event convened by the Argyle Executive Forum.
"We wanted to be able to make sure that we knew what we were going to stand for, and that it resonated with the consumer."
This community was formed through a tie-up with Communispace, a Boston-based company that specialises in recruiting
online research panels on behalf of brands and which has previously worked with clients in a diverse range of industries,
including Bank of America, Danone, Heinz, Unilever and Walmart.
Santander's community spanned various demographics in order to reflect the diverse nature of the banking audience. "We
wanted a broad base of people. We wanted to have different levels of income; men and women; young/older; small
businesses. So we spent a lot of time collaborating with [Commuinscpae] on the type of people," Klingler said.

Two members of Santander's panel

"We talk a lot about being customer-centric that's what our brand is, that we're driven by helping out customers make
progress. For us, if that's really true, then we really need to be close to our consumers; we really need to be listening to them,
and we really need to be taking that, and taking actions upon what we're hearing."
Attaining that closeness depends, in large part, on moving beyond traditional techniques and building long-term relationships
with research participants. "This is not a focus group or a quantitative research study. These are people who are engaged
with us and have been engaged with us for about 18 months. This is an online platform where we're going in and getting to
know them. They are co-creating our bank and our brand with us," Klingler said. "These folks look at everything."
An illustration of this process in action came as Santander was formulating its positioning and value proposition for the US,
when, according to Klingler, its respondents provided the following insights:
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"Almost all of them came back and said, 'I'm really not particularly happy with my banking relationship'."

"A lot of what they said is that we talk about ourselves our strength, our stability, our products but we really don't
know them; we haven't really built a relationship with them, we're not really listening, we're not really being customercentric.

"They think we all have the same issues.On one side, we're being pressured by the regulators; on the other side,
we're being squeezed on fees. And a lot of folks in these communities said, 'We see we're the ones in the middle being
impacted by this'."

"They still say we make things confusing: it's still not simple; there are a lot of products; it's really hard to work through, to
make decisions and to move forward."
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"They believe that we set all the rules."

Within all the negative appraisals about the existing experience on offer from most banks, however, were clear hints about how
Santander might be able to achieve differentiation.
"Almost everybody said that they're not comfortable with money, that they all feel a bit overwhelmed and all the options look
similar to them," said Klingler.
"It was back to basics: they were looking for simplicity; they were looking for people to get to know then and understand then
and make it easy for them to make progress That's really what we took away in terms of our brand and what we need to be
thinking about as we move forward."
Such insights fitted neatly with Santander's international positioning, which was developed in Madrid and based on the notion
of being "A bank for your ideas." Arnold Worldwide translated the idea into an ad campaign relevant to the American audience,
including TV spots focusing on commuters, joggers, moms and office workers.
Prior to the campaign's launch, the messaging and commercials were rigorously scrutinized by Santander's online panel to
ensure they left a genuine impression. "When we were talking to our global partners about 'A bank for your ideas' we went
into this community," said Klingler. "They really, truly co-created with us."
Santander replicated this approach as the Spanish economic downturn intensified in the run-up to its official US launch.
Internally, Klingler revealed, opinion was divided almost 50:50 on potentially halting the launch given worries about the
possible knock-on impact of the crisis on the perceptions of American consumers, or whether to press ahead.
"We went into the community and people came back and said, 'We're not really thinking about the Spanish crisis,'" explained
Klingler. They were, in fact, more interested in whether the switch from Sovereign to Santander would require getting a new
debit card, and what else might change about the former arrangements. "This community enabled us to confidently move
forward," she added.
At the product level, the same source of inspiration contributed to the creation of the 'extra20' checking account unveiled by
Santander shortly after its official launch that promised to give customers $20 every month if:
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direct deposits reaching $1,500 entered their account;

they paid two bills using the company's BillPay tool.

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Said Klingler, "This came out of the community. This is where people came back and said, 'If we're a loyal customer we want
to see your loyalty coming back to us.' And this is where this product came from: in these conversations with these people."
A more recent exercise with Communispace related to the changing path to purchase for Santander's products. To determine
how community members reacted to ads and made decisions, the bank sent researchers to "watch their journey" in person, so
as to gain a far richer understanding of the role played by different channels.
"They are all over the place and testing all of their sources to get comfortable before they move forward," said Klingler. "We
saw inflexion points along that journey where we needed to dial it up and improve that experience to meet their expectations.
Within Santander, the Communispace-created community has obtained sufficient status that some members attended the
firm's Leadership Innovation Summit this year to "co-create with us in person." Externally, members' opinions have contributed
to a strategy that has seen the bank secure 10% awareness in the US from a base of zero, and helped it claim second place in
the industry in when it comes to consideration among shoppers familiar with the brand.
To build on this momentum, the firm is now expanding the size of its consumer panel. "This is not a one and done. We didn't
put this community together just because of the rebrand; this lives and breathes for us, we still have many of the same
members from the beginning, and we've recently refreshed it with more people who can give different insights and different
perspectives as we move forward on our journey. I mean, we just started; we just launched last October," said Klingler.

About the Author

Stephen Whiteside is Warc's Reports Editor.

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