Post Office pushes role as financial services ‘challenger’ with TV campaign
The Post Office is promoting the launch of its new sub brand, Post Office Money, with a new campaign that looks to push its position as a ‘strong challenger’ in financial services.
An FCB Inferno-created TV spot will air on Sunday (1 February) with the line “We help make money easier” to showcase the simplicity of the products newly branded under Post Office Money, such as banking, foreign currency, insurance, mortgages and travel insurance, and will highlight recent changes for the company such as longer opening hours across its branches.
The spot will bring back the characters of Robert Webb and sidekick Doobie the Dachshund who were introduced in the company’s Christmas campaign, ‘Get Christmas Wrapped Up’.
Pete Markey, chief marketing officer at Post Office told Marketing Week that the Christmas campaign was highly successful for the brand, delivering year on year revenue growth that “exceeded their expectations” and brand health scores that suggested it was “one of the most successful campaigns we’ve ever done”.
“We took the learnings and success of the Christmas campaign into launching Post Office Money,” Markey says. “The ads work together or as a standalone.”
The move is part of the Post Office’s plan to become one of the top five financial services providers by 2020, stating that it currently has over three million customers for banking and insurance products and nine million for foreign currency.
“We’ve been doing financial services for a number of years but we’ve never brought them under one umbrella,” Markey says. “We want to be seen as a credible financial services provider.”
In recent months Markey says the company has worked to modernise its outlets, opening roughly 2,000 branches on Sundays and introducing longer hours.
“We’ve really worked hard to modernise the network and improve the customer experience,” he says. “There’s a lot going on at the minute and we have the building blocks in place, so this was the next logical step.”
As part of the ongoing effort to drive cut through in financial services, the Post Office will launch mobile services in the coming months, according to Markey.
The campaign will be supported by social, digital out-of-home displays across rail and underground networks as well as mobile and digital display ads, which will involve games and quizzes in an effort to push the ease of using the brand.
