Stefan Krogh-Hansens blog

I am not directly involved in this case and I don’t have any inside information about the case. I purely write this from my point of view

What Danske Bank surely has discovered during the financial crisis is that the consumers thrust in Danske Bank and the financial sector as a whole has dropped significantly – add to that there has been some very negative stories in the press as well.

To anticipate this, Danske Bank initiated a campaign to regain thrust. Normally companies (especially dull financial ones) would keep this 100% internal. They would conduct an analysis of their consumer’s satisfactory level and start a process of fixing some of the problems identified. The issue with that is that is so damn hard to convince their customers (and potential costumers) those changes now has happened. A costumer who is already disappointed about their bank is particularly a stubborn consumer to convince, thus resulting in an expensive price per reach afterwards.

Seeing is believing! What I think that Danske Bank has done very well is that they dare to engage in a completely honest and open dialogue with their consumers. They started their campaign on TV by urging customers as well as non-custumors to openly say what they think about Danske Bank. This ended up with 3.500 comments and even videos(!) on their site, a lot of them was negative and very skeptic about Danske Banks intentions and working method.  

Some of the comments said that Danske Bank was greedy, had no moral, etc. etc.  Danske Bank have to date answered 766 questions. I haven’t read more than a few, but some of the answers were written not only by mere web-guys but by higher ranking personnel in the company as well.

They ended up with 23 things that they wanted to change and they just recently made a video public where they stated their current process in their ambition to become a better bank.

The things identified range from openness to education, but are surely points that the consumers can look at and find that it in some way will benefit them.

If you understand Danish then check the link to Danske Bank to read more, if not have a look at the pretty pictures http://www.danskebank.dk/da-dk/bedrebank/documents/bedrebank.html

Kudos from me for being brave and honest with the costumers, let’s see if it pays I am not sure that this alone can pull it off. Personal wealth is something that is very emotional for consumers.

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That was what I was initially thinking. But then I went down to the gas station and bought a bag of HARIBO candy. Then I started to think about whether this a brand choice in a social context – obviously not. No one would see me throw all the wine-gums down my throat faster than a Olympic champion on dope ran the 100 meters back in the 80’s.

This purchase was solely for me. I might have considered the social context if there were some people in the store that I knew. In that case I perhaps didn’t wanted to show that I were planning to eat a full bag of candy, but I would have bought a bag of carrots instead.

If e.g. I had an overweight then I might be considering the signal I was sending by buying the bag of candy, meaning I would think about what the cashier would think and maybe other people in the store that I didn’t know either. So the same buying situation could be both solely individual as well as in a social context depending on a lot of factors. I think a term for this could be social involvement. The involvement would then be influenced by a number of factors such as the persons individual mind set.

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I was just checking my twitter the other day and the last 15 updates was from Lance Armstrong. I have been enjoying following his way back to the Tour De France, but these many tweets actually made me consider to un-follow him. I have actually quite recently unfollowed a “specialists” in the social marketing discipline – solely because of too many tweets.

Normally you would think that the reason for why I follow a guy like Lance Armstrong was to get a lot of info on what he is doing, but the level of info is getting too much now. I see it this way; there are different target groups. I am interested in the sport and the training he is doing, maybe a few insights from the sport e.g. all the doping controls. I am not interested in the person Lance Armstrong as such, therefore I am getting a lot of irrelevant information about him.

My point is that the consumer will see it as spam if the he/she gets irrelevant information so the marketeer should wisely consider what information that is relevant for his/hers followers. The same goes for social media specialists (and me!).

The downside of Twitter is really the lack of possibility to segment your tweets to different segments. That would really improve the power of Twitter as a marketing tool.

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