Jumpstarting Revolutionary Products – the Danske Bank Case

“When we were planning the advertisement campaign for June, we wanted a deeper understanding of what the customers were expecting and their perception of investment robots.”

Dorthe Krogh Jensen
Head of Brand Experience & Marketing at Danske Bank

The Challenge

Sonar and Danske Bank share the same belief: when you want to be the key player in global competition there is no room for errors. The easiest mistake to make is to forget the human behind the customer.

One of the great challenges when introducing a new product is to ensure a powerful marketing campaign. Danske Bank’s aim with June – its digital investment assistant – was to take out the complexity of investing your money, and thereby make it available to the broader majority of people, giving them the opportunity to get a positive return on their savings.

It’s no longer an opportunity only for professionals, but also for the average Joe who doesn’t want to have a sleeping private savings.

In consequence, the central business objective for these studies was to gain deep, rich human insights to develop a winning marketing campaign in order for June to secure awareness, positioning, app download and usage.

The participants for the studies were a broad B2C containing current and non-customers of Danske Bank.

The Solution

Right from the start, it was clear to Danske Bank and Sonar that the best solution was to involve potential customers across the process in the making of the marketing campaign for June. This meant taking a design thinking approach and involving customers iteratively in the development.

Sonar suggested a three-stage customer-centric process:

1. Campaign idea test
   Test the initial marketing idea before the campaign went live.
2. Final campaign test
   Danske Bank took the insights from the first study and adjusted the campaign as well as the persona. It also knew the people behind the customers and was ready to bulletproof the final taglines and campaign.
3. Market adaptation test
   With insights from the Danish market, Danske Bank could apply them to the Swedish market and cover cultural differences.

The methodology for all the studies was characterised by a high level of customer involvement. Each study covered in detail: the understanding of taglines, online and offline campaign materials, and the campaign as a whole.

“It was essential for us to get credible and authentic reactions to different ways of presenting our message. The way to do so was to design a customer-centric campaign development process.”

Dorthe Krogh Jensen
Head of Brand Experience & Marketing at Danske Bank

Results

When you partner up with Sonar you shorten your campaign delivery time dramatically. And the evidence is clear in the results for Danske Bank. After three customer-centric testing studies, the bank could celebrate a successful campaign with proven documentation of the changes.

Today, after the launch, June is the most used investment robot in Denmark and now has more than 20,000 investors*

One of the central insights Danske Bank gained was the perception of June. The initial persona was a young, fresh and sassy representation of June. However, after the first study, the participants perceived this persona as untrustworthy with a lack of credibility.

After the final test, Danske Bank could go live in Denmark and Sweden with a reputable, young jet messaging to their target group.

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