The Intesa Sanpaolo Group’s International Subsidiary Banks Division has developed a new strategy to harmonise communications at a local and international level.

Defining a communication strategy for a system as complex as the international subsidiary banks (ISB) of Intesa Sanpaolo Group was an ambitious undertaking. It required a great deal of cultural sensitivity, flexible thinking and open-mindedness. ISB comprises 11 banks in 12 countries, each with its own language, culture and market.

More than 70 professionals from these countries, each with different cultures, religions and languages, collaborated in several design sprint workshops (an intense process where user-centered teams tackle design problems). They helped define a single creative platform that is flexible and transferrable to the needs of the individual countries.

The new strategy – created in response to the dramatic changes of the past two years and the need for a new approach to communications – has been in development since December 2020. It was worked on by 11 countries and the bank’s headquarters.

The pandemic has impacted the behaviours, feelings and expectations of banking clients, and this has informed the need for new technologies and services to provide for a new way of living.

The four design sprint workshops covered retail, digitalisation, SME and corporate, and ESG (environmental, social and governance). Participants answered crucial business questions via problems, solutions and testing exercises. They then came up with communication ideas which included multimedia campaigns, commercial TV and other initiatives.

“To carry out the project we chose the path that was perhaps the most challenging but definitely the richest in potential,” says Danilo Guenza, ISB’s head of external communication. “All the banks’ communication teams, together with their creative agencies, were involved. It was basically a huge exercise in teamwork, organised remotely with dozens of hours of meeting and discussion.”

One of the key challenges for the communications team took into account was that in the past two years the percentage of people trusting banks dramatically decreased from 43% to 29%. A new message was needed to change this negative perception.

To do this, the team focused on what people really care about to develop its core values: “We care about what you care about.” These values have been addressed in three key pillars:

We care about people
We care about the future
We care about society
A new pay-off – “For all that counts" – was devised to describe the bank's mission to be always at people’s sides, helping them attain every goal, big or small, and to protect and preserve what really counts.

The messaging also focuses on life’s dilemmas – and how, if the difficult ones are solved, all that remains are “joyful dilemmas” such as which colour to paint the walls of the newly purchased home or where to go for next year’s holiday. The intention is that customers will feel reassured their bank will be there through all their life’s events and the moments that really matter.

The joyful dilemma concept has been realised in videos with music from composer and musical consultant Philip Abussi. Each bank can adapt the concept to its own branding and voiceovers.

The bank hopes adopting the new communication model in every country will strengthen the brand and help it become the bank of choice for all clients. 

This work has also helped to create a more valuable and common professional culture at the service of the company. Renato Vichi, head of institutional affairs and external communication at ISB, says: “The outcome of all this work is a common strategy, a common payoff to define our distinctive market positioning, a new creative concept for campaigns’ development and a common graphic format to increase our brand recognition.” 

Guenza adds: “The outcome is a great treasury of ideas, thoughts and proposals to be implemented in the coming months and years.”