BankWithUs: Media Planning Strategies

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Table of Contents

General information
Why Media Planning
Media Planning Recommendations
References

General information

BankWithUs is a young business company that wishes to become what every business company wishes for itself; get bigger. Dealing mainly with mortgages, the company wishes to extend its market shares in this sector. It is the intention of this report to show the possible ways how can this be done and the role that media planning can play in achieving this objective.

But the basic question of starting this report would be to assess the market condition regarding banking and especially focus on the mortgage sector of the market. It is fair to acknowledge that the banking sector has been undergoing a shock during last year and which is still in course. Especially customer trust has been declining upon the mortgage services offered by different bank due to the financial crisis and home foreclosure phenomena taking place in different countries around the world, not just Australia.

Nowadays banks and financial companies are trying to keep their market share and position. They are also trying to limit the damages upon their brand name recognition. This is an important struggle as its outcome will be the changing in market position of different banks and companies during the years to come.

At the present moment the Australian Banking Sector is dominated by four major banks: Australia and New Zealand Banking Group, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, National Australia Bank and Westpac Banking Corporation (Marks & Young 2008, p. 4). They are also the one who combined own the greatest share of the Australian mortgage market sector.

Thus it is important to see how is the crisis going to impact them and how much market share are they going to lose in order for other actors to come in and gain that share. The facts are that they are already losing much ground and both of them are having a major retreat in the mortgage sector of the financial market. Especially Westpac Banking Corporation seems to suffer the greatest loses up until now (Yahoo Finance- WBC 2009, par. 1).

On the contrary since its birth BankWithUs has been conceived in a revolutionary form. It differs in many aspects from the “traditional” big banks that offer mortgages to the people. It is due to this differentiation in form and a good policy of low interest rates that made this new company acquire 3% of the market of all Australian mortgages. Not it intends to double its market share within a year and, by doing so, consolidate its brand name and market position.

Why Media Planning

BankWithUs aims to set itself apart through its no-fuss approach to banking and accessible language and products. In a certain way it aims to be “special” and differentiate itself from the big four banks. BankWithUs is something new and ingenious within the industry. Media planning is also revolutionary in getting the message out to the audiences. And this is the most important factor for BankWithUs at the present moment: get the message out to the mass audiences about the product (services) it offers. Media planning differs from the “traditional” form of advertisement of your product because it offers a deeper knowledge about the persons you are sending the message.

It is not about the form of the ad, it’s about its essence; how is it made, placed and used. Thus media planning can offer the adequate techniques and methods to BankWithUs in order to reach its goals the most efficient and effective ways possible. The purpose of this report is to show the company that by spending correctly the budget in media planned manner; it will achieve the most from it.

Media Planning Recommendations

Target audience and message

BankWithUs is a mortgage company so its main target group is home buyers. In particular the primary target is the first home buyer who is assumed to be between 18 and 35 years of age and with an income between $80,000 and $100,000 per annum. The company believes that the simplicity of the product and the guaranteed initial lower interest rate are thought to be the strong point of difference.

This came as a result of an extensive research conducted by the company which revealed that 85% of Australians aged 18-60 believe home loans are too complicated and rigid. Thus the slogan for the campaign is proposed to be: “BankWithUs, the company which makes home loans easy and affordable”. As you can see we have added the terms affordable to the slogan proposed by the company team because we believe that the combination of easiness and affordability will further benefit the company. This is because the main target of the campaign is mainly young professionals who wish to live on their own.

Here we have two sub-targeted groups that must be considered. The first is people who will live alone, who are not engaged in any sort of intimate relationship, and the second group is people who are married or wish to get married soon thus they want to buy a home. It is especially for this second category of people, the ones who are or wish to get married, that the message of affordability is mainly about. This does not mean that the first sub-group does not care about costs but the second sub-group are more sensitive to life costs because of their increased expenses due to family life, especially if they have kids (“Cost of living in Australia”, 2009, par. 12).

Thus it is important that the message that shall get to the audiences it is best to combine easiness in procedures and affordability.

Campaign objectives

Actually the company has a market share of about 3% of all Australian mortgages. The main objective for this campaign is for BankWithUs to achieve a 6% market share of all Australian mortgages within one year.

Extensive research BankWithUs’ dedicated account managers are available to make it easy and uncomplicated to understand and apply for a home loan. This is the first tool for attracting customers. For example, features of the product, such as an option to skip one payment a year are anything but rigid. The second tool is the 0.2% reduction on the standard variable rate for the first year of the loan if customers sign up for a minimum of 3 years. BankWithUs already offers lower interest rates than the big banks mentioned above, so this is a considerable saving!

The combination of these two tools should also be the composition of the message transmitted to the audiences through the media channels.

Which media to use, how to use it and how to spend on it

Here comes the real challenge. Most of the advertising professionals would recommend using as many media as you can and “bombard” the audience with your message. We believe that is not the correct thing to do. It may have a boomerang effect and “harm” the image of the company instead. Customers may get “bored” and, since the image of the banking sector has been hit hard by the current financial crisis, it may seem like a desperate tentative by the company.

In order not to create this image in the public a selective media usage should be used. The company has a preference for using high-end magazines for their new media campaign, as they have heard that this medium is particularly engaging for the target market that they wish to attract with their advertising. But it would be best to use different media classes and not just one. Their combination would increase the chances of success for the campaign.

It is important not just to have as many TARPs as you can on any media but also have the maximum reach and high frequency. The wider the reach and frequency, the better the message has been transmitted.

Regarding the area to be covered, we believe it is best to focus on the metropolitan areas like Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. This choice is related to the main targeted group of this campaign.

As mentioned above they are mainly young professionals aged 18-40 who most are concentrated in this areas (“Social Trends”, 2009, par. 3).

For this campaign we propose the usage of a major TV station that has coverage of all the metropolitan areas. The Sydney Metro ATN 7 is the perfect Tv station to be used. The arguments for using Tv is that from research made 91% of Australians use TV as a media form (Roy Morgan 2008, par. 2). At the same survey done it shows that during their hours-per-week media usage, Australian prefer TV as the primary for with 21.8 hours per week, or an equivalent of 42.5% of all their media usage of the week.

Thus the TV campaign would require half of the budget of the company has for the total campaign. The presenting of the BankWithUs advertisement in ATN 7 will begin in the final week of January and will continue uninterrupted throughout all of February and March. Then there will be a stop due to the holidays and it will re-begin in the last week of April continuing in the next three weeks of May.

The tool we use to measure the transmitting of the message to the audience is TARP, or “target audience rating point”. It is the percentage of target prospects that have been exposed to a particular media unit. The Tv channel we have chosen has a high TARP per week (31.7). Since ATN 7 has an average 31.7 TARPs per week and the campaign will go on for 21 weeks on Tv the total would be around 665.7 TARPs. The Tv station requires $8920 per week for a 30 second spot. Thus the total cost of 21 weeks would be $505,764.00, half of the budget.

As we have mentioned before the target audience would be people between 18-40 years old. Thus we would transmit he ad in Tv programs that have a high viewing on this groups. Since the average TARP per week of channel 7 is 31.7 we want to assess how many people of18-40yos have we reached. Below I am giving the population statistics for the two groups of interest to us (18-24yos and 25-39yos) taken from Rate Card Plus for the metropolitan areas of Brisbae, Sydney and Melbourne, which also are the targeted areas of the campaign.

Brisbane 428,170 + 500,830= 929,000

Sydney 710,585 + 1,090,000= 1,800,585

Melbourne 350,000 +550,000= 900,000

Total population: 3,629,585

Reach = 31.7% (TARPs) x 3,629,585 (total population)

Reach = 1,150,578

The message through Tv can reach 1,150,578 persons in the three metropolitan areas.

The second way of reaching people would be that through high-end magazines, as the managing team of the company had previously decided. It is best to assign 35-40% of the budget to this method. The Australian NetGuide Online is a young and fast growing high-end magazine. It is especially known among the youth and people between 20-35 years of age. It is perfect for our goal. It has a TARP of 21.3 per week among this category of people. It is a magazine dedicated to high technology and to easy software solutions (“About Us” 2008, par.1).

It goes in synchrony with BankWIthUs’ objectives of easiness and online banking for people.

If we do the calculations from above we see that for this magazine we can have a reach of:

Reach= 21.3% x 3,629,585 (total population)

Reach = 773,102 people between 18-39 years of age

We will insert an ad in the magazine that will cost $6000 per week and will continue for 15 issues, or 15 weeks. The total cost will be $387,000 and wi will have a 597 TARPs in total.

And the rest of the budget can be used to finance Direct Mail options. But since the product we are promoting is innovative we will not use the “traditional” mail service, but the new e-mail and personal sms service. we can use the actual database of the company to send its clients a sms. The same can be done with e-mail. The final 6 weeks (last of April and all of May) will be the time to send this sms and emails. This will be after the TV and magazine campaign have already begun.

This method will assure us with 100 TARPs which will be added to the previous methods TARP’s.

Even though the average TARP’s per week is low for this method, still it is worthy. We can still reach by this method:

Reach= 11.8% x 3,629,585 (total population)

Reach = 428,291 people between 18-39 years of age

Attached you will find the assignment schedule with the detailed calculations.

References

Marks, Bob & Young, Owen. 2008 Four pillars debate needs refining: AFR Economic Briefing. Web.

Yahoo Finance Key Statistics – wbc. 2009. Web.

2009. Cost of Living in Australia. Aussie Move Website. Web.

2009. Economy, money and tax. Australian Bureau of Statistics. Web.

2009. Social Trends. Australian Bureau of Statistics. Web.

2008. Media usage among Australians. The Roy Morgan Website. Web.

2008. About Us. The Australian NetGuide Online Magazine. Web.

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