What kind of 'Steve' are you?

17 October 2014 - 02:31 By TJ Strydom
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FNB
FNB
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If your name is Steve and you take things literally you might be offended by First National Bank's new billboards and the coming radio ads.

''We've had some calls from 'Steves' complaining that they are the butt of a joke," FNB chief marketing officer Bernice Samuels told The Times.

''But we'll make it clear that it's not personal," she quipped yesterday.

Steve - the fictional call-centre agent who has been phoning FNB clients since June 2011 to convince them to switch banks - has become a brand in his own right. So much so that the bank over the past few weeks has posted billboards asking: ''Are you a Steve?" without the FNB logo.

Ad agency FoxP2 surprised many in the industry when it won the FNB contract from more established agencies DDB and Metropolitan Republic, both FNB's agencies-of-record at the time.

''We just liked the vision [FoxP2] had," said Samuels.

She called it a new direction for Steve.

FoxP2 creative director Grant Jacobsen said the new campaign will focus more on client behaviour than on a specific person.

FoxP2 didn't come from nowhere. Jacobsen used to be with DDB and worked closely with FNB on the original Steve campaign.

Samuels said that though DDB ran the campaign, the initial concept came from the bank's own marketing department.

She gave Grant a call while he was at an awards ceremony in Cannes and told him about the new idea for a Steve.

''He said 'Hmmm, ja'."

The ''Un-Steve Yourself" campaign is aimed at positioning FNB as the bank that has the solutions.

Jacobsen outlined five Steve types:

  • The apathetic Steve - ''Today's the day I switch my bank", but he never does;
  • The ignorant Steve - ''I just didn't know" about the new app or feature, or how to pay less for banking;
  • The naive Steve, who believes his bank is the best ''because they said so".
  • The fearful Steve, who thinks switching banks or transacting online will make him the target of ''hackers and paedophiles";

The cynical Steve who has been ''burnt by other banks and decided that all banks are the same".

Everyone can be a bit of a Steve sometimes, said Jacobsen.

The new campaign is aimed at getting other banks' clients to switch and to help FNB's existing clients get the full benefit of the services at their disposal.

In the year after the Steve campaign was launched, in May 2011, FNB gained 1.7million clients.

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