The Importance of Context [2006]
It used to be, if you asked someone to draw you a picture of their banking relationship, you’d get back a picture of a tiny stick figure standing next to a large rectangular monolith. [We’re talking qualitative research here, not art class.]
Now you mostly get images of a person and a computer screen.
The bank has shrunk. It no longer threatens. It’s useful and available, sometimes even intuitive and proactive. More than half of New Zealanders aged 18 to 64 do internet banking.
For them, the bank is an online tool. It’s now implicitly compared to Google and online booking systems rather than to other financial institutions.
Have banks grasped the enormity of this change? Do they now present themselves as your helpful little toolkit for life? Or are they still essentially projecting a façade of faux friendliness between you and the faceless corporation?
Judging by BNZ’s little pigs, ASB’s likable bumbler and ANZ’s staff who’d love you to make the effort to come in and let them get to know you, some banks still feel the need to cover up.
By comparison, Kiwibank’s values-based manifesto and Westpac’s practical diagrams are heading for the right territory.And if the National Bank ever figures out how to encapsulate its haughty brand in a high end online interface, it may do too.
Bottom line : the context of banking has changed. People going online to do banking don’t have a relationship with a large and complex organisation, they access a functional tool.
So far, the positions of Swiss Army Knife and Even Better Alternative ‘Cos It’s Kiwi have been sized up. National Bank may come up with the Exclusive Designer edition. But where will the others go?
Context is all important. You have to know who you are and where you are, to know who to be.
I’ve just completed a little study for an embryonic clothing chain that, in its original setting makes perfect sense, yet in others can become almost inexplicable.
At home it’s a badge of belonging and a smart functional choice. Away from home it’s a visitor, struggling to learn the local customs, trying to fit in with the wrong crowd. As you do.
I’ve been working on a book this year with my “friend and tormentor” as I privately think of him, Chris Brown of Sputnik Ltd. Now off at the printers, 8 Tribes : the hidden classes of New Zealand is all about the social contexts we create for ourselves and the values that underlie them.
Some of you may have been involved in the pilot test of the questionnaire that will accompany the book when we launch it to the general public in early 2007.
From the questionnaire we’ve found two quite different profiles emerging: one comprising people who overwhelmingly belong to one tribe and the other, for the rest of us who draw our tribal identity from more than one source.
They, the mono-tribal, tend to see everything through a single lens and are happiest when their core values are present in whatever they do.
The Grey Lynn mono-tribalists will seek out principled bankers and non-exploitative clothing chains; the Raglan mono-tribalists will jump through hoops to avoid anything that shrieks “corporate”.
On the other hand, we, the social chameleons, adopt different expectations in different situations. When we want competitiveness we want North Shore-like competitiveness, when we want luxury, we seek Remuera-style opulence.
You find the context for your brand at the point where these two forces of expectation meet. In online tools we do appreciate efficiency before anything else. In the absence of other shared tribal values, or when expediency dictates, we’ll gravitate to the simplest, fastest, most intuitive one.
In clothing stores we expect congruence between the store brand and the clothing style. This covers fitness for purpose and clear messages about tribal allegiances in everything from their location to their fabric choice. Then we’ll decide whether to go there.
I suspect our wicked little book [that's the publishing imprint] is going to provoke some interesting conversations about context and expectation. Russell Brown in November’s Unlimited magazine has already started one. I look forward to more of them.
[Copyright Windshift Communications Ltd 2006] Distribute [unchanged] with impunity. Quote with attribution.
. . Context is all important. You have to know who you are and where you are, to know who to be.
