Rebuilding Society - a look at Nationwide's Dunfermline Building Society part 3
The third and final part of The Drum's interview with Alistair Welham, head of products & marketing regional brands at Nationwide Building Society.
Welham was originally marketing director of Derbyshire Building Society before being given the responsibility for the marketing of Cheshire and the Dunfermline and says that the three have many strong similarities.
“They tend to attract the same types of customers, they tend to offer the same products and they do it in a very similar sort of way. There are some very strong similarities. I’ll go back to that sort of internal brand framework around ‘Proud to be Local’. That works for each of the brands, but it works in a slightly different way because the brands are perceived and understood by them. We’ve noticed, particularly with Cheshire being close to Manchester, that has a slightly different relationship with its customers because of the nature that it works in. Derbyshire operates across a much broader range, across a city and rural space. What we’ve learnt is that we know what customers want, which is a combination of things, it’s strong local relationships, great service, but also the depth and breadth of products, by being able to deliver that formula into each of these businesses, it’s a successful combination.”
Welham has already said that while he will use each brand to ‘experiment’ with marketing techniques and platforms for delivering messages in order to find what techniques work best, but he also says that the marketing of all three will continue to be handled by their appointed regional marketing agencies, and that they will not see their accounts consolidated and moved to a London agency.
“Historically when you have a stand-along building society business, you tended, and this was the same at Derbyshire and the same at Cheshire, you tended to default to having a single full service agency approach because you felt that you got value for money out of that and it worked for the business. As we’ve gone into our new way of operating with multiple brands across different businesses, we’ll be taking a balanced approach. So what I want to have in place is both the benefit of that local agency experience but also some scale and commercial advantage by using a variety of agencies on our roster across three businesses and into the parent company.”
He continues to explain that Dunfermline will continue to work with Family as its regional agency, with Origin as the marketing agency for Cheshire, and with Together, which services the Derbyshire brand although he will look to ‘revitalise’ the marketing agency roster, but this does not mean that he will be looking to review the roster going into the new financial year.
“It’s not a review as such, because we are happy with the relationships that we have got, but it’s more about refining and complementing the roster to make sure that it has got everything we need,” Welham adds.
With the recent announcement that Bradford & Bingley are to merge, while Santander has been created in the UK through the consolidation of other building societies, including Abbey, how does Welham’s brand strategy for Nationwide alter within a consolidated marketplace? He says, as one of the marketplace’s key players, the main thing is to portray confidence and allay any fears that customer may have, both regionally and nationally.
“Part of this is not to get too hung up about what the competition is doing” he continues. “It’s always good to have some strong competition and we don’t get too hung up on what the competition is doing, but you have to have some strong competition to ensure that you’re continuing to meet the needs of your customers in the right way and the way to judge us is on how well we do in acquiring new customers and keeping the ones we’ve got.”
It would be remiss, when the financial sector is in its worst state in living-memory, not to enquire as to how Welham sees the immediate future for the industry and how strong a brand Dunfermline and the Nationwide stable is at present.
He doesn’t pretend to be under any illusions that, while his brands are in a healthier state under the ownership of Nationwide than they were before, that the finance industry is all things rosey.
“We’re still in a difficult marketplace,” he responds. “We’ve been bumping along and the return to coming out of the recession is going to be a slow return. We’re all hoping that the property market with the boost in increased levels of the stamp duty will help to encourage first time buyers and get the property market moving and stop that ‘Double Dip’ fear around property values. That’s one of the areas. Clearly employment is one of those areas that is could have a big negative factor, so we’re all hoping that employment figures stabilise. It’s all about the philosophy ‘Steady as she goes’ and let’s take this carefully and build the confidence slowly and that way we will step back to a better place.
“There’s no drama here. You’ve effectively got safe, professional, capable people delivering safe, robust products to customers.”
It seems so simple, but hat is one sentence that is almost incredible to hear just 12 months on from Nationwide’s acquisition of Dunfermline; “There’s no drama here.”
How times change.