As Seth Godin has often said, marketing is not simply a banner advertisement or billboard touting the newest, most improved washing up liquid or fabric softener. It is the spread of an idea. And ideas, just as banking products or services, are embraced and spread most effectively when they resonate with the audience’s beliefs, self image and values. That is, they fit within their worldview.

How can you make them fit within their worldview? The answer is to work with consumer or customer insights. An insight is a statement, which expresses a consumer’s frustration, an unmet need or desire.

Ideally, an insight addresses an aspiration, a current situation and a need gap (the gap between the previous).

If you manage to formulate a true insight it gets the following reaction from those involved:

“Wow, yes you’re right. You really understand what’s going on here.”

In order to get really strong insights it’s crucial to have a good understanding of your target group. The only way to achieve this is through empathic listening to your target group. Also in the banking sector, the use of insights is key. Instead of talking about complex financial products that people don’t understand, get out of your offices and go talk to those people that use your services or might use them in the future. Try to really put yourself in your target group’s position and create products that show you understand them and that seamlessly fit their needs.

An interesting example to illustrate my point comes from a Base of the Pyramid (BoP) case. The base of the Pyramid includes the world’s four billion people that live on less than $2 a day. These consumers are often heavily underserved. Inspired by an article by CK Prahalad & Stuart Hart*, more and more multinationals, including banks, are diving into these markets to seek for new growth based on new business models (more on this on a later post).

Especially in Marketing to the BoP it’s key to work with insights. There often is a gap – of knowledge, of understanding, of relevance – between the values held by the BoP consumer and the value propositions offered, for the most part, by the companies that seek to serve them. A tagline created without using insights was “Now you can bank on the go with your mobile” which is irrelevant to someone who has never banked and doesn’t imagine he or she could even be eligible. By just making the statement “If you have a mobile phone you can now protect your cash”, you do make a connection. The last tagline is based on true target group understanding and insight and will certainly capture the attention of those at the BoP.

*(CK Prahalad & Stuart Hart, The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid, Jan 2002)