As Habib Bank prepares to unravel its new brand communication campaign, Aly Mustansir, EVP/Head Marketing & Brand Management, talks to Aurora about the strategy behind the rebranding of a great Pakistani institution.

AURORA: Habib Bank is about to undertake a major brand repositioning. Is the timing significant?
ALY MUSTANSIR: The transfer of management to the new owners happened about three years ago, and a significant portion of time was spent in defining a new strategy. The management was very clear that they were looking for a global strategy that would remain valid for the next 15 years or more. So the idea was not to rush into things, but to figure out what our pillars of growth would be. Following on from this was the importance of implementing brand management in its true essence.

A: How radical will the rebranding be?
AM: The key deliverable of the brand strengthening exercise was the development of a brand vision, mission and values, along with a clear definition of the brand’s positioning, essence and personality. When we started looking at the bank as a brand, we realised how much work had been done in the 1960s and 1970s; work that gave the bank the high equity it enjoys today. Unfortunately, the bank lost that momentum during the nationalisation period. Despite this, we realised that there were certain things that the people associated with the bank. There are old campaigns that still run in their minds, taglines they still remember. For example, the child saying “meraa bhee tou hai”, is something everyone from a certain age group remembers. Also, every Pakistani, whether an account holder or not, has some association with the bank; it could be that their father banked with HBL, or that HBL came to their school with one of those little piggy bank boxes, or the fact that there was an HBL branch on the street where they lived as a child. There is an association for everyone and in an emotional sense, the association is very positive. HBL has always represented Pakistan. When I joined the bank almost a year ago, we did a massive consumer study and I was amazed to find that the bank had a 32% top of mind recall, which is huge for any brand; it means that every third person on the street you ask to name a bank will think of Habib Bank. That’s incredible! This really makes Habib Bank an archetypal brand; Customer feedback also gave a very clear idea of the brand elements that have extremely strong association with the bank and should be retained. The colour was one of them and certain elements of the symbol.

A: I thought the lion had been dropped at one point?
AM: No, it was very much there. If it had disappeared, it would not have been on the entrance to the Habib Bank Plaza either. The lion has always been a symbol of Habib Bank. However, we felt it was time to refresh the logo. In practical terms, we were looking for something that would be easy to reproduce. The symbol is very intricate in every little detail, which makes it difficult to reproduce on different kinds of material while maintaining the consistency of the look.

A: Has the lion been redesigned?
AM: It’s the same face and shape but in printing and artwork terms it has been simplified to ensure consistency.

A: Is Habib Bank being rebranded as HBL?
AM: HBL is the brand. The trading name of the organisation remains Habib Bank Limited.

A: Which name will be projected?
AM: Both. As I said, the name of the bank is Habib Bank Limited. From a marketing perspective, we will use the acronym HBL as the brand.

A: Do you want the customer to recall the bank as HBL or Habib Bank?
AM: That is really the consumer’s choice. From a branding point of view, it helps to be HBL.

A: Why?
AM: If you have a brand name that is long and then you add a product name to it, by the end of it the consumer remembers neither. We have retail products, consumer products and agri-products, which need to be registered by the consumer. However, if you look at our new identity, next to the letters HBL you will find our symbol with Habib Bank written in English and Urdu. So the essence of who we are and what we have been to the country remains as it was. Some people may even look at our new identity and think we haven’t really changed that much. But if there is no need for radical changes, why make them? The changes we have made have been led entirely by how the customer sees the bank or what he believes Habib Bank means to the nation.

A: What message will your new campaign communicate to the customer?
AM: The new campaign communicates HBL’s brand vision: “Enabling people to advance with confidence and success.” The interesting part about the campaign is that it uses real situations and success stories to bring the brand vision to life. The challenge is to have people unlearn and relearn a few things about the brand.

A: What would they have to unlearn?
AM: For example, just the way the symbol appears to them or how the face of the bank looks to them. It’s a 60-year-old symbol and even if we have refined it just a little, the change is still noticed. We deal with customers who range from the very sophisticated to the very basic, and when you get to the very basic, each little change can cause questions and be a source of confusion. So communicating with them will involve a number of phases and it is going to take time. A few years ago, I was with an FMCG company and I was involved with the repositioning of one of their big brands; we developed the best of media plans, but by the end of six months, when we did our dipstick study, we concluded that the message had reached about half our target audience and that meant urban more than anything else. It takes a long time to get a message registered and remembered by your entire target population. The important thing for the bank is that our positioning is not something we picked up now; our positioning draws from the key strength of our heritage.

Advertising in Pakistan went through a period of development and then the quality went down around the 1980s and has only started to resurface in recent years. We have lost a lot of time, which is why advertising case studies in our colleges and seminars talk about Indian advertising. This is sad, because in the 1970s the quality of our ads was way ahead of Indian advertising. We understood positioning and branding much more than they did. Today it’s very different and we have a lot to learn from markets where good advertising is produced. And that’s what these global agencies bring to the party.

A: Will heritage be part of your communication?
AM: Absolutely, that and our population coverage are our big strength and differentiator. We have nearly 1,450 branches all over Pakistan, which is much more than the next competitor. We have branches in areas most people in the country have never been to. HBL has always believed that banking is a right and that every consumer in the country should have access to a bank. This has been HBL’s ethos and the way we have always worked. So the assurance we will be giving our customers is that the aspect of the bank that they have come to rely on will not change. We do not suddenly want to become a ‘wannabe’ western looking bank with young guys in suits working there and say this is the profile of the customers we are now going to deal with. This would be disastrous for those customers who have been banking with us for years; if we turn around and say we are going to work in a new way and you don’t fit in, where will those people go?

A: Given that liquidity within the banking system is fragmenting, how important is the rural market going to be in the future?
AM: Ultimately banks will have to start moving towards the rural markets as that is where two-thirds of your population lives, even if in value terms their business could mean a little less compared to the urban sector.

A: How well are you equipped to deal with the rural customer? One of the criticisms levelled at many brand managers is that they are too urban-centric to understand what goes on in the rural areas.
AM: The advantage with Habib Bank is that when you have a branch in every small village and town you have had your own people there for a long time. In fact, some of our branch managers are looked up to by the people of that area. They are the trusted people the locals go to, not only for banking transactions, but for advice on a variety of matters, financial, social, personal. These guys are extremely important! They are much more than just the guys who manage the branch, and thanks to them, we have a sound knowledge about what our customers are like out there. So before cascading our new brand vision to our customers, the job right now is cascading it down to the smallest of our branches. The branch manager is really the consumer’s spokesman right now and we will use him to localise the message to our customers.

A: Who are your partners on the ad agency side?
AM: We recently appointed JWT Pakistan and Prestige Grey. The entire business, including corporate brands, products, etc., will be handled by these two agencies.

A: Why were these two agencies selected?
AM: We had a huge pitch involving 14 creative agencies. Given that we were going to make such a big change, we wanted to ensure that we included everyone considered good to make a pitch.

A: What will these two agencies bring to the table?
AM: Knowledge about most consumer segments. The criteria was quite exhaustive. It included strength of creative idea, brief understanding, consumer market understanding and organisational understanding. Internationality was a requirement as well.

A: Why internationality?
AM: Habib Bank is present in over 25 countries, and although we haven’t really mobilised marketing in many of those countries yet, it is on the cards, and when you start to mobilise marketing in your international operations, the last thing you want to do is to hire separate agencies in separate countries. So it helps maintain consistency in branding if you have a harmonised network. Also by being a part of a global network there are a lot of learning the agencies get from abroad. Advertising in Pakistan went through a period of development and then the quality went down around the 1980s and has only started to resurface in recent years. We have lost a lot of time, which is why advertising case studies in our colleges and seminars talk about Indian advertising. This is sad, because in the 1970s the quality of our ads was way ahead of Indian advertising. We understood positioning and branding much more than they did. Today it’s very different and we have a lot to learn from markets where good advertising is produced. And that’s what these global agencies bring to the party.

A: Which media platforms will you use to communicate the new message?
AM: When you are launching a new identity and a new positioning, your ATL elements have to be there. TV is still the biggest source of information for most of the country. For me, activation will really make the big difference. Brand Activation is a department within our brand management division; that’s the level of importance we are giving to it.

A: Is the objective of the campaign to simply communicate the new brand identity or are you looking to widening your customer base?
AM: It will be both, but to begin with, communicate the message to our current customers. We have over five million relationships in all corners of the country and the first task is to have the message go out to these people and then get the message out to others.

Mariam Ali Baig was in conversation with Aly Mustansir. For feedback: aurora@dawn.com