How Coutts, the 300-year-old bank remains relevant
Marketing a 300-year old brand like Coutts brings its own set of challenges. According to Sarah Deaves, the chief executive, there are three central marketing challenges for leading a private bank like Coutts.
First, Coutts has private clients - the equivalent of marketing to a segment of one. Second, its role means the bank exists to give advice to help with life’s journey – its client’s passions, fears, hopes and dreams. And finally, what Coutts offers is not always tangible, it’s about the role of its people and how this offer is brought to life. Deaves finds it helpful to address these challenges using three facets – drawing on history, using segmentation and using experience.
Deaves believes that Coutts needs to use the past carefully. Using history to understand the brand, leads the bank to draw on its DNA and truths which can sustain generations. However, there are some elements of history that can be ditched to ensure Coutts remains relevant today.
It’s not simply about making the brand contemporary but about making it relevant too. For example, Coutts partnered with British designers Oswald Boateng and Stella McCartney to design iconic, modern cards. More recently, Coutts sponsored designer Matthew Williamson’s fashion show and will put its name behind London Jewellery Week in June.
Since 1999, Coutts has created client groups and uses segmentation to reach clients. The bank is building its skills and understanding of people from knowledge of clients’ world, their source of wealth, the structure of their current and future sources of income to give perspectives on their wealth management.
Coutts is also beginning to segment into new areas of interest such as philanthropy and family business. Interestingly, women are becoming an increasingly substantial segment and around one-third of its 60,000 client base. Meanwhile, figures from a 2006 Centre for Economic Business Research study estimated that 53% of millionaires are likely to be female by 2020.
Finally, Coutts uses experience to communicate the brand to its clients. This means employees play a key role in the look and feel of the brand. There are 90 people involved in the client experience from joining, to the buildings, to the tone of client communications.
The bank also likes to involve clients in experiences to build relationships. Deaves says that its events programme is “uniquely Coutts” and helps with the greatest challenge, which is that the bank’s client base is a broad church. To ensure that Coutts is perceived as suitable for all, the brand has to show a face to each constituency that makes the brand relevant to them – and this is the tight rope it must walk.
Coutts’ events range from the arts of the Royal Opera House and Welsh National Opera to the more cutting-edge Almeida and Royal Court productions. Meanwhile, its charity work sees the private bank work closely with The Prices Trust, Unlock and Kids Company.
By drawing on history, using segmentation and creating experiences, Coutts, a 300 year old brand remains relevant to all the different types of clients the private bank serves today.
Sarah Deaves is the chief executive of Coutts & Co, the UK’s leading private bank. Sarah is the bank’s first female CEO and was speaking at a Marketing Society Business Leader dinner on January 23rd. Coutts is the private banking arm of the Royal Bank of Scotland Group (RBSG) and manages the wealth of around 60,000 ‘high net worth’ clients in the UK.