MARKETING PEOPLE

AIDAN POWER Director of Customer, Brand and Marketing, KBC Bank Ireland

With over 250,000 customers, KBC Bank’s Aidan Power, director of customer, brand and marketing, explains to John McGee how its ‘challenger’ status in the market is paying dividends.

Describe your role with KBC Bank

I joined KBC Bank Ireland as Director of Customer, Brand and Marketing in 2012 and have been growing the challenger banking brand — ‘The Bank of You’ — ever since. My role is to drive a ‘digital first’ brand strategy, making sure the brand remains a challenger brand at its core. That means we need to stand out and be different in a consumer’s mind.

What are your marketing challenges?

At KBC, we do banking differently and want to give consumers every reason to experience this for themselves. Challengers displace the norm and as such a brand you can find new ideas get copied very quickly.

A key challenge is to recognise when it is time to refresh your identity, spirit and character. For me, it is critical that we evolve the brand and proposition for consumers continuously — to ensure we keep the ‘challenger’ in challenger bank. You need to constantly question, challenge, and be different if you want to hold the challenger title. You also need to constantly stay ahead.

It’s been a big task to build brand presence in communities around Ireland since we launched as a retail bank in 2013 — to create that distinctive identity.

We have ambitious growth plans, but this means we have to consistently cut through. Our new national brand campaign, which we launched in September, does just that.

In trying to bring a different proposition to consumers we try to behave differently within the business. I like to think we have a different and more agile mind-set, that allows us to stay ahead. We try to disrupt, dominate and stand out in anything we do.

Secondly, we listen to our customers to find out what they think of us. Part of the challenge is to design for the future consumer as well as today’s consumer, so we are building propositions for what we believe to be future needs. Over the last two years, as customer experience has become more important, our aim has been to ensure KBC is as customer-focused as possible as we push forward.

What media channels work best for KBC?

For the brand to stand out we have gone back to our first principles as a challenger and how we approach bringing our message to the marketplace. What we try to do is outsmart our competitors – dominate where possible, disrupt and most importantly, amplify. As a growing brand we need to maintain spending in traditional media, but if we are a digital-first brand then we need to be digital-first in our media-buying strategy. KBC’s digital spend now has at least 50pc of our media budget.

I recognise that amplification is not achieved by paid media alone, so with this in mind we continuously aim to supercharge our presence and communications across all touchpoints.