Geary Interactive loves a challenge. It could be our collective competitive natures or the chance to prove our capabilities, but when we were invited to be a shoot-out contestant at iMedia's Financial Summit, we found ourselves presented with an offer we could not refuse.
While it took a bit more explanation than usual to get the team up to speed on our assignment -- a "pretend" pitch for a fictional bank -- Geary's presentation was approached with the same vigor as any other pitch. After all, client or no client, there was still a competition to win.
Geary's goal was twofold: Impress a room full of smart, banking marketing executives and win the shoot-out. The second goal in particular afforded Geary's pitch team more theatrical leeway than most other pitches, and since personality is not something that "Gearyites" tend to lack, the chance to play this up was not going to pass us by.
So here is how the shoot-out was won.
The proposal
The premise of the Financial Summit and this proposal could not have been more relevant to the atmosphere outside the event's New York locale. Building on the palpable and volatile economic climate, iMedia presented Geary with an extremely timely challenge to create a transitional marketing plan reaching customers of a small community-focus bank that was just acquired by the fictional Premiere National Bank (PNB).
There were many complicating factors to the proposal. One of which was that for the last decade, Northern Tri-State Bank (NTS) had branded itself as a collection of neighborhood banks and explicitly contrasted itself to the perceived faceless and callous PNB. So creating a new relationship with a customer base preconditioned to dislike the "evil empire" that just acquired their accounts was not going to be easy. Fast-acting media also created a hurdle for this campaign to overcome; NTS customers were first notified about the acquisition by TV broadcasts and newspaper reports -- not PNB or NTS. Since this breaking news was sent out via media outlets days before PNB was able to develop its own plan, Geary's marketing and media roadmap needed to take into account that PNB's target audience was upset, unnerved, and had little faith in the new bank.
The RFP also stated that 50 percent of current NTS customers used online banking tools, and over the years, NTS made concerted efforts to offer customers localized content in newsletters and on each of their branch-specific websites. In response to the news, some of these internet savvy customers created/joined the "Save NTS" Facebook group that sprouted within days of the acquisition news.
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