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December 2007 - Strategy Magazine
Brands of the year

Financial brand of the year: Scotiabank
Banking on the richer life
Scotiabank scores a hat-trick with engagement marketing

by Carey Toane
page 54

The last Saturday in September, Globe and Mail readers came across a full-page colour ad which declared: "This weekend, life's richer." The ad listed a hat-trick of events happening that weekend in Toronto with two things in common: they featured Scotiabank as title sponsor, and they were all unprecedented successes.

Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, that "all-night contemporary art thing," saw attendance numbers double over the year before. The winner of the Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Marathon, Kenyan John Kelai, broke the Canadian record. And

standing-room-only crowds gathered to hear 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Vincent Lam and eco-guru David Suzuki speak on the Scotiabank Bestsellers Stage at the Word on the Street festival. All three were covered heavily by local and international media, and you would have been hard pressed to find a Torontonian who didn't attend at least one. Welcome to the Scotiabank clean sweep.

Rather than take full credit, however, Scotiabank VP domestic marketing Rick White is modest. "If I said it was all well thought-out in advance, I'd be lying," he laughs. "There's a lot of good luck here."

While the weekend was exhausting for organizers and volunteers alike (not to mention for those of us who were up for 48 hours), it also marked a pinnacle in the engagement marketing efforts of Canada's third-largest bank (in terms of assets). For the first time, Canadian bank marketing was fun.

"Increasingly, you find big brands which are thought of as being somewhat vanilla and static - not things that people have a passionate relationship with - trying to find appropriate properties that allow them to engage potential customers in an environment that's all about passion," says admirer Andy MacCaulay, president of Toronto-based agency Zig.

Amid intense Big Five competition, Scotiabank's original goal was to differentiate the brand and get it out there to as many Canadians as possible - all on a budget about one-half to one-third the size of that of Royal Bank or TD Canada Trust. "It's a category that hasn't got a lot of engagement, so it makes it hard to break through in the marketplace. It's hard to build a strong brand, certainly," says White, who has been with Scotiabank for 13 years. "Among the things we have learned over the last little while is because of the nature of this non-engagement, we need to find ways to drive engagement in non-traditional ways."

Entertainment, then, is a perfect fit with the bank's optimistic brand positioning under the tagline: "You're richer than you think." Scotiabank has worked to position itself as "un-banklike" in everything from its self-deprecating humour to the more informal art direction on the Cassie

award-winning integrated campaign by Toronto agency Bensimon Byrne, which wrapped in March of last year.

"The initial launch [three years ago] was based on the functional attributes of 'You're richer than you think,' how a few small moves in the way you do your finances can save you 53 bucks a month," says Bensimon Byrne CD David Rosenberg, who was on the team that won the Scotiabank account in 2000. "Whereas with the experiential strategies and sponsorships, we're leveraging the emotional side, life's experiences, and how a bank can play a role in that."

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