CMO interview: Bringing customer insights and brand storytelling together at ASB Bank

General manager of marketing for the Commonwealth Bank-owned New Zealand banking group shares how a customer decisioning engine and digital is being united with brand strategy and human values

Shane Evans
Shane Evans


Striking a healthy balance between innovation and human attributes such as warmth, friendliness and family is the key to ASB’s brand success, its GM of marketing, Shane Evans, believes.

And it’s this combination that’s been behind ASB earning more than 50 New Zealand and global industry awards in the past three years, from Most Effective Client at the Effies, to multiple accolades at the New Zealand Direct Marketing Awards, an Effective award at the Beacons, and a gold Lion at Cannes.

Evans himself has been at ASB for eight years, overseeing marketing for the longstanding financial services institution, which is owned by Australia’s Commonwealth Bank. Prior to this, Evans was in London and led the rebrand of Aviva across 28 markets. The work involved overhauling more than 50 brands and was described as “slickest rebranding exercise in corporate history’ by the UK Times in 2009.

Emphasis for Evans at ASB in recent years has been building out a customer decisioning engine to improve, automate and personalise communications, from marketing through to services. The financial institution has adopted Adobe and Unica to build out its tech stack, and created a conversation library based on recognised customer needs.

Today, 300 conversations are being sent out any given evening from more than 500 options.

“These are different conversations we can have based on all the data triggers and behaviours we have observed and defined from customers,” Evans tells CMO. “These can, for example, be service-based conversations to say we’ve seen you’ve had some money deposited in your account, and would you like to move that into an account earning better interest for you.” 

Historically, teams would source a dataset, and go out and contact the customer with an offer or opportunity. “What we have done is brought that into our own systems and enabled it to happen in an automated way based on data we have,” Evans says.

“We’ve then identified all the different conversations we can have with a customer to ensure from a financial wellbeing perspective we are helping them get to the right place.”

Conversation opportunities can become endless, so to prioritise, ASB works first to understand the right customer outcome. “Is it simple, easy, and save me time for example?” Evans asks. “It’s work that reminds you how important it is to have a deep understanding of the customer.”

It’s also easy to get obsessed with technology and data sources and miss the customer point, he agrees.

“We have a wealth of data available to us; what I’m interested in is how we triangulate different data sources to get to a true insight,” Evans says. “It’s about devising key insights you can take forward to inform a go-to-market strategy, be it brand, a comms program or conversation.”

ASB’s decisioning engine has shifted the role marketing is playing in the organisation, Evans says.

“If you think of marketing in the banking context, it can often just been seen as a corporate comms function. But because we’re investing in so much capability to contact customers directly, we’ve become a pivotal piece in how you communicate with customers,” he says. “Our services are more in demand than ever before because we have the customer decisioning engine at the heart of our efforts.”

Digital innovation

Hand-in-hand with the conversation work is digital innovation. Again, data insight has been vital in informing experiences and products ASB creates.

“As a bank, we have a lot of resources helping us understand customers, from research to different teams helping inform different opinions. We also have a great retail and distribution unit, so we can talk to frontline people having conversations with customers every day,” Evans continues.

“We use all those insights to ensure when we’re building out digital experiences, we’re enabling customers to make decisions without having to go to a branch or jump on the phone.”  

A recent innovation is fixing rates on a home loan via a mobile app. “I did this before Christmas at the airport in fact: My wife and I sat down together, looked at the rate table that came through to us, and selected the new home loan rate we thought was best,” Evans says.

“Previously, you would get a letter then have to make a phone call or go into a branch; we did it together looking at a phone. Those triggers and behaviours ultimately save customers a huge amount of time. When you match it with a really slick digital mobile experience, that’s when you’re really winning.”

Another is a product called ‘Card Control’, so customers can lock and block their cards from different transactions. Capabilities include stopping overseas transactions, turning access off or on, or changing a card limit.

“It is still one of the most popular things we’ve done,” Evans says.  “We’ve also been investing in our ‘home loan central’ product, which enables you to take a longer-term view of your home loan. You can see, if you make smaller incremental payments, how that might reduce payments over time. In addition, we invested in a wealth central platform to see all investments in one place, as well as change them up.

“In all instances, it’s about delivering innovations giving customers direct control… With our next-best conversations, we can then provide prompts or reminding you on better products suited to you, or updates.” 

Brand strategy

Increasingly with digital, product experience becomes interlinked with marketing and brand. This means keeping an eye on brand strategy, and Evans is constantly striving to balance innovation with human-centric values.

“At ASB, we strive for that sweet spot of innovation and warmth, friendliness and family -  these are the things we hold dear and we’re always trying to find ways to focus on both,” he says. “If you look at ‘Clever Kash’, which we launched a couple of years ago, this focuses on children’s’ financial literacy, and encourages people to save and parents to have that conversation with children. It was a world-first from a digital moneybox perspective, so it hit the notes around being an innovative product and service.

“If we can focus on those two things, it’s a brand and marketing win.”

Evans agrees modern marketers have a tricky time balancing brand values in the face of data-driven and automated, multi-channel activity. “You don’t want to leave behind the storytelling component,” he warns.

“When I started my career, the go-to-market was relatively straightforward – you had four or five channels. That doesn’t exist anymore, and we’re always optimising a huge library of content. It blows me away when the guys get their content lists back and see where it is. Maintain consistency is important, and maintaining brand essence and tone is an ongoing challenge.”

Brand also remains the key differentiator for ASB in the marketplace, Evans says. So to keep up momentum, he maintains a separate team focused on the longer-term brand piece.

“Absorbing the changes and resetting our playbook to have a point of view on where you’re going to be in five years is important,” he says. “Marketing for me is about driving towards your business objectives in the current environment and the aims of the organisation. Brand is the longer-term view of where you’re going and how you’re building out that platform to inform everything else.

“Our brand people sit more on the creative and storytelling end, go deep into what’s happening in the market and new ways of going to market; then we have more direct-focused marketers with a strong understanding around customer need and providing a slick experience off that.”  

Up next: The changes in org process and ways of working, plus values of marketing

Join the newsletter!

Or

Sign up to gain exclusive access to email subscriptions, event invitations, competitions, giveaways, and much more.

Membership is free, and your security and privacy remain protected. View our privacy policy before signing up.

Error: Please check your email address.
Show Comments

Latest Videos

More Videos

More Brand Posts

What are Chris Riddell's qualifications to talk about technology? What are the awards that Chris Riddell has won? I cannot seem to find ...

Tareq

Digital disruption isn’t disruption anymore: Why it’s time to refocus your business

Read more

Enterprisetalk

Mark

CMO's top 10 martech stories for the week - 9 June

Read more

Great e-commerce article!

Vadim Frost

CMO’s State of CX Leadership 2022 report finds the CX striving to align to business outcomes

Read more

Are you searching something related to Lottery and Lottery App then Agnito Technologies can be a help for you Agnito comes out as a true ...

jackson13

The Lottery Office CEO details journey into next-gen cross-channel campaign orchestration

Read more

Thorough testing and quality assurance are required for a bug-free Lottery Platform. I'm looking forward to dependability.

Ella Hall

The Lottery Office CEO details journey into next-gen cross-channel campaign orchestration

Read more

Blog Posts

Marketing prowess versus the enigma of the metaverse

Flash back to the classic film, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Television-obsessed Mike insists on becoming the first person to be ‘sent by Wonkavision’, dematerialising on one end, pixel by pixel, and materialising in another space. His cinematic dreams are realised thanks to rash decisions as he is shrunken down to fit the digital universe, followed by a trip to the taffy puller to return to normal size.

Liz Miller

VP, Constellation Research

Why Excellent Leadership Begins with Vertical Growth

Why is it there is no shortage of leadership development materials, yet outstanding leadership is so rare? Despite having access to so many leadership principles, tools, systems and processes, why is it so hard to develop and improve as a leader?

Michael Bunting

Author, leadership expert

More than money talks in sports sponsorship

As a nation united by sport, brands are beginning to learn money alone won’t talk without aligned values and action. If recent events with major leagues and their players have shown us anything, it’s the next generation of athletes are standing by what they believe in – and they won’t let their values be superseded by money.

Simone Waugh

Managing Director, Publicis Queensland

Sign in