Rebuilding core brand values The Halifax campaign

After concentrating most of its activity during the late Eighties on fighting rivals, the Halifax recognised the need to return to promoting core values, handing the task to Bates Dorland. Below we examine the agency’s approach, while Dominic

The Halifax is the UK’s largest building society. Following the deregulation of financial services in the late Eighties it had to initiate offensive and defensive product launches

to stave off competition from rival societies and high street banks.

But with Halifax’s emphasis on financial products between 1986 and 1990 brand and advertising tracking indicated that the brand’s core awareness and saliency had declined dramatically by the start of the Nineties.

Halifax briefed Bates Dorland to devise a campaign to harness the sheer size of the building society and turn it to consumer advantage. Advertisements had to be far more single minded than just providing product line support and they had to be far more memorable than previous efforts. They also had to communicate the brand’s personality.

The brief was given to the creative department in early 1991. Qualitative and quant-

itative motivation research demonstrated consistently that people were looking for organisations of stature in an uncertain financial environment and in

the context of a great deal of faceless and poor consumer communication. Consumers wanted good service with friendly expert advice.

Both the society and the agency felt that Halifax’s stature and success was based on its emphasis on people.

The creative solution was to demonstrate the society’s size

by building enormous symbols out of people with Halifax as

the facilitator for important events in people’s lives – buying a home of their own, a wedding and the bridge from youth into

adulthood.

The campaign was backed by 1m support in the last three months of 1991, 8.3m in 1992, 5.5m in 1993 and 6.2m in 1994.

According to research from Millward Brown, brand awareness has risen from a benchmark of 19 per cent to a peak of around 45 per cent since the campaign began despite lower levels of spend than previous years.

It says that Halifax now enjoys the best branded advertising cut-through of any financial brand. Additional research between 1991 and 1993 from MORI showed an increase in those feeling very or mainly favourable to the brand from 33 per cent to 46 per cent.

During the campaign Halifax has enjoyed three years of record profits and increased its share of all financial sectors. But it would be too simplistic to lay this exclusively at the door of advertising.

Dorland says that the lesson of the development of this campaign is about remembering the “poor bloody consumer”.

It is too easy to get tangled up in the complexity of marketing and the multiplicity of products and services – in the end people don’t want a mortgage, they want a home.

HALIFAX

Assistant general

manager, marketing support services:

Mike Lavender

BATES

DORLAND

Planning director:

John Ward

Account director:

David Wood

Creative director:

Paul Walter