Your story matters — Says Absa
ABSA Bank, a leading universal bank, has launched a new brand positioning that captures its resolute intention to carry along its customers to achieve their dreams and goals.
The new brand promise is summed up in the tagline, “Your story matters” which heralds the bank’s preparedness to listen to all categories of customers and be part of their unique stories and journeys.
“By this new positioning and brand promise, we want to make a bold declaration to be a bank that listens to each unique story of individuals and customers”.
“It is a bold intention and a commitment of the organisation to partner with our customers and individuals in their unique journeys to help them grow and write the story together,” the Director, Marketing and Corporate Relations of Absa Bank Ghana, Nana Essilfuah Tamakloe, said at the media launch of the new brand positioning of the bank in Accra last Tuesday evening.
She said by the new brand positioning, Absa had set a clear path to ensuring that customers took advantage of the bank’s entire suite of services and products as the bank lived up to a more customer-centred and empathetic service attitude across all its operational areas in Africa.
Ms Tamakloe said the refreshed brand declaration was part of Absa Bank’s ambition to align its offerings and brand experience with “Empowering Africa’s tomorrow together, one story at a time”, an internal corporate purpose which was launched last year.
The Director of Marketing and Corporate Relations emphasised that the new brand positioning also reflected a step-change throughout the organisation, involving enhancing the value of its products, improving levels of customer service and significantly improving capacity to deliver banking solutions that would be timely and relevant to its customers.
Context
The brand repositioning comes five years after Absa became a standalone African bank and four years after its rebranding in Ghana, with the tagline ‘Africanicity’.
Ms Tamakloe said for the past four to five years, the bank had been busy rolling out products and services and improving platforms.
Recently the bank launched a QR Code payment system which enables customers to transact business with ATM cardless, with yet another service to ensure that customers could sign on remotely, the Digital Onboarding”, while customers could now purchase treasury bills on its App.
“Since the launch of Absa Bank four years ago, we have been evolving along with changes in the world and customer needs. Last year, we launched the new purpose of ‘empowering Africans together’,” she recalled.
That was followed by a new set of values – behaviours to anchor the new purpose – which brought the bank to the point of asking how the bank would live in alignment with the purpose and the behaviour.
“So what we are doing now is repositioning the brand, which remains Absa, but we are looking at all the elements such as how we want to evolve and look and serve customers. How we want our customers to see and interact with us,” Ms Tamakloe expatiated.
The Director, Marketing and Corporate Relations, therefore, summed up the brand promise, “Your Story Matters” to mean the intention of the brand to ensure that it was part of the unique journey of the customer.
She explained that the promise permeated the bank and was not just a preserve of the marketing unique but an organisation-wide awareness and behaviour that put the customer, who made the difference, at the centre of every service.
Ms Tamakloe explained that over the years, financial institutions had looked at customers and individuals as risks, but Absa with its new brand promise wanted to look at them as people with unique stories that deserved a hearing.