'The Gruen Transfer' creator Jon Casimir says Commonwealth Banks rate hike won't affect branding
Will the Commonwealth Bank's actions this week affect its brand?
The Gruen Transfer co-creator Jon Casimir does not seem to think so.
"Choosing a bank is what marketers call 'low-involvement', an unexciting decision that doesn't give us any joy. We make the choice and then hope we'll never have to think about it again."
"And the truth is, most of us are too lazy to change banks, no matter how badly they behave. The banks know that too -our inertia is factored into their business model. Most bank ads don't encourage us to switch, but to take up more products at the bank we already belong to."
Casimir noted that this week's event when the Commonwealth Bank jacked up rates by 0.45 percentage points immediately after the RBA's announcement of its 0.25 point increase had happened before.
" In 2008, in the same week that the Comm Bank launched a new $50 million campaign with the slogan 'Determined to be different', it raised its interest rates higher than those of its competitors."
"Now, as then, we bitch and moan and shake our fists at the sky, but we then think about how much paperwork and cost would be involved in switching banks, and we tell ourselves it'd be no different at another bank anyway."
Casimir's show The Gruen Transfer explores the persuasion business, examining how advertising works and how it works on us. The accompanying book, set to be released this month, stands on its own.
Casimir's new book, also called The Gruen Transfer, imagines your 3000-message day, from eyes open to eyes shut, cataloguing many of the tactics advertising uses to colonise the consumer's mind. The book is partly based on conversations that happened on the show, research that did not make it on the show, as well as on all-new interviews with the Gruen panel, industry experts and advertising dissenters.