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January 2008 - Strategy Magazine
Brand diary

Streetwise banking

by Carey Toane
page 34

Forget Bay Street. When ING Direct launched 10 years ago, its street of choice was the "information superhighway." In this edition of Brand Diaries, we take a year-in-the-life look at the home-grown flagship of the now-global bank brand. And what a year. Read on to see how a new product, a new online tool, a consumer-generated viral experiment and a 10th-anniversary event all happened in 12 short months.

In the spring of 1996, Philippe Garneau, creative partner at Toronto-based GWP Engineering, got a call from the Dutch firm ING Group. The insurance conglomerate had identified Canada, with its regulated oligopoly of five banks, as the ideal country in which to debut a new virtual bank brand, and GWP was charged with the blueprint for the new entry. They went with a no-nonsense,

anti-big-bank-fees approach, the Pantone colour 165 orange and a steely-eyed Dutch spokesperson named Frederik.

In April 1997, roaming guerrilla street teams clad in orange cycling gear hit the streets across Ontario, armed with flyers and orange Tic Tacs to mark the launch of ING Direct. Over the next 10 years the virtual bank opened branded cafés (now called infospots in English Canada) in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary, and attracted 1.6 million customers with its stripped-down product portfolio of a savings account and an "un-mortgage."

ING Direct has since opened for business in eight more countries around the world, taking ING to number 81 on Interbrand's Top 100 Brands list for 2007. And this month the financial services provider expands its Canadian product portfolio by one-third with its first branded mutual fund.

The past 12 months have been busy for ING Direct Canada head of marketing Mark Deep and his team of 30 at the company's Toronto headquarters. April marked the brand's 10th anniversary in Canada, which was celebrated publicly on June 1 with the first National Save Your Money Day (NSY$D), an idea Garneau proposed to Deep at a breakfast meeting in November 2006. "There'd been talk of another [provincial] holiday," explains Garneau. "I thought, wouldn't it be great to give people a day off from service charges and fees from other banks?"

This year also saw the launch of a new online tool, the Goal Getter, as well as a social media branding exercise, the Superstar Saver contest with YouTube Canada. And the latest chapter is this month's launch of the Streetwise Fund, a passively managed index fund designed to shake up the mutual fund market. "We want to leverage the success we've had," says Deep. "We've always been advocates on behalf of clients, and we think there are more opportunities to deliver better value and drive growth. But we want to be sure it's relevant and it fits well with our brand."

Behind each of these projects is an effort on the part of the branchless bank to develop meaningful and relevant interactions with clients and consumers. As the domestic market for banking alternatives heats up - with newer entries like HSBC edging in on the savings market, the trend towards credit unions and "ethical banks" such as Alterna and even one of the Big Five (Scotiabank) taking a more informal, "un-bank-like" stance - Canada's original FI challenger brand found some creative ways to build more visibility and consumer touchpoints. Here's how.

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