2015 Silver Best Business to Business Campaign

Proximity London

Lloyds Commercial Banking

Can you tick it?

The Team
Fran Perillo, Tris Sellen, Nick Myers, Victoria Hutchinson, Emma Madry, Paul Hackett, Bob Lambourne, Crystal Yau, Lucy Aird, Dan Stewart, Lavern Mason, Richard Carpenter, Adrienne Pascal, John Treacy, Rob Kavanagh

Contributors
Xerox - Print production, MEC Greenhouse GroupM - Digital media placement, pH Experian - Data management

Campaign overview

Lloyds Commercial Banking launched a campaign to turn high-value small to medium-sized business (SME) cold prospects into customers. But businesses that turnover between £1 million and £25 million a year have little time for extra admin, meaning just 4% of companies switch banks annually. And SMEs think banks are all the same – so even when they get a raw deal they tend to stay with ‘the devil they know’.

By concentrating on a service proposition rather than a commercial one, Lloyds asked SMEs to score their current bank’s quality of service and turned dissatisfaction into new customers worth millions of pounds per year.

Strategy

Conventional SME wisdom says that switching is all about the offer of a free banking period, but research showed what mattered to high-value SMEs was service – it was the main reason for switching. And within companies, Financial Directors (FDs) are hardest of all to serve. So it came as a revelation that for over a decade FDs had voted Lloyds ‘Best Bank for Service’.

The bank leveraged this hidden truth with the proposition ‘Service that’s second to none’.

Research suggested it would take five to 10 contacts to trigger a switch, but couldn’t pinpoint exactly when a SME would be minded to move. So the campaign delivered a series of five bursts of activity spread across 12 months.

Creativity

FDs deal in rational arguments and switching wouldn’t be done on a whim, so a scorecard was created to prompt them to evaluate their banking arrangements for themselves.

This scorecard borrowed from the scoring criteria of the FDs’ Excellence Awards, with a few of Lloyds’ own USPs included. It was mailed along with a branded pencil, allowing FDs to literally draw their own conclusions. Even sending the pencil was probably more attention than their own bank had shown them in years.

The creative played to endowment bias, hoping that by getting prospects to put a bit of themselves into the pack, they would be more likely to respond.

Results

Providing SMEs with this vehicle to make a rational case for switching, something they’ve felt in their gut every time their bank has let them down, worked a treat.

Despite the research suggesting that more than five contacts would be necessary to drive a switch, the campaign smashed its annual target with the first burst of activity.

With the mail pack costing less than £1 and being followed up by email, the power to change entrenched behaviour with just a big idea and some real service was proven by an ROMI of 59:1. More than 275 SMEs switched, bringing approximately £5 million into Lloyds Commercial Banking and, more importantly, initiating relationships that Lloyds’ service can maintain for an average 12 or more years.