Understated is not a word that readily springs to mind when you arrive at the headquarters of HSBC, in London’s docklands. The 40-storey monolith is not (quite) the biggest building in Canary Wharf, but the message that its sleek, aerodynamic profile, tinted glass and cathedralesque entrance lobby sends out is unequivocal: we’re big, we’re powerful, we’re reliable and we’re people you want to do business with. Which is exactly the kind of message you should be sending, if ‘global’ is as critical a part of your brand as it is HSBC’s. It’s a prime example of building as a metaphor for brand.
So it is with a mild sense of trepidation with which I approach the (vast) reception desk, introduce myself to the immaculately uniformed receptionist and ask where I can find Amanda Rendle, the company’s head of corporate marketing. If she is anything like as dyed-in-the-wool corporate as the building, this may be a difficult interview, full of strictly party-line answers and overrun with management-speak.
Five minutes and three lifts later, I emerge into an altogether more intimate reception room on floor 26, having taken a wrong turn in the lobby and boarded the wrong lift. As if I needed reminding of the scale of the tower, I had to ask for directions twice.
The view from here is simply astonishing, even though we are facing East, away from the sights of central London. Suddenly, the feeling of being inside a macho corporate edifice melts away, and the elevation serves only to inspire and excite. It’s somewhere that anyone would love to visit, let alone work in.
Just as the environment within the headquarters belies its outward persona, so does Amanda Rendle, who arrives shortly. She is at once friendly, disarming and down-to-earth, but all the while with a very tangible clarity of message, of thinking and sense of purpose. Rendle readily agrees that she is privileged in terms of her working environment. It’s a very inspiring place to work, she says, We’re already seeing work start for the Olympic village and we watched Wembley get built. It is a big, tall, modern building, and it could be seen as sterile from a marketing perspective, but I don’t think it is; there’s so much going on around you. Rendle adds that she is all too aware of the poverty that surrounds Canary Wharf, which includes some of London’s most deprived boroughs. I make sure my team spends time outside of the business, going to visit branches and customers. We certainly don’t take an ivory tower view.
This sense of the broader perspective and willingness to learn from the wider environment is a theme that can be traced throughout the length of Rendle’s career, and is one of its defining features.
Rendle did not begin her career in marketing; in fact the marketing world almost missed out on her skills altogether. I didn’t go to university. What I really wanted to do when I left school was get into makeup for TV. I had a place at the London College of Fashion to do this. But marketing was on her radar at that point, and she also had an alternative offer of a place to study it at the City of London Polytechnic. Faced with this unusual choice, in the event she rejected both options, she accepted a job in strategy and planning at Mercantile Credit (the consumer and business credit subsidiary of Barclays), which has been significant in that it exposed her to the intricacies of financial services at a formative age.
I was impatient, she admits, regarding what would turn out to be a crucial decision. [London College of Fashion] would have been a five-year course. It was a big commitment, and there was no guarantee that you’d come out with anywhere to go. I suppose my passion was not strong enough.
But she had not been long at Mercantile Credit, immersed in numbers, before her creative urges began rising to the surface. Doing the finance exams put me in contact with the marketing function, and the head of marketing made me an offer to come and work with him. I then started doing marketing exams.
Given the ultimate direction that her career has taken, it is obvious that this period was a major influence on Rendle. Since moving on from Mercantile Credit, her CV also includes spells working agency-side for Barclays, Girobank (now part of Alliance & Leicester Commercial Bank) and Swinton Insurance, although not always B2B. So what is the appeal of this often dry and highly technical marketplace? It’s such a challenge to understand how to market financial services. It’s not like marketing sweets or even stationary; it’s very complex and requires lots of thought. It’s a very interesting market.
Her fascination has been intensified by the gradual evolution that is opening the finance market to more creative marketing techniques. The landscape has changed dramatically, and it is continuing to change for the better. Obviously the products are still regulated, but the way you can talk about those products has changed; there are more opportunities. The rulebook has gone out of the window.
The second defining moment in Rendle’s career occurred after she had jumped the client/agency fence and was working for Limbo the through-the-line division of BBH in the early 90s. With the full blessing of her employer, she seized the opportunity to take on the task of establishing a standards programme for client Whitbread, aimed at increasing the quality of service in its pubs and restaurants. Rendle explains, I effectively set it up as my own business, and took on other clients on a consultative basis.
She continues, I ran the whole thing, including everything from marketing to the recruitment of telemarketing staff, and learned loads about the [hospitality] industry, most of which I’ve forgotten. It was a very interesting time, and I had great fun doing it for two years. I not only used my marketing skills but also general business skills. I had to be entrepreneurial. It taught me a lot about how business works.
This experience of entrepreneurship clearly left a lasting impression on Rendle, and when she returned to full-time work in 1996 having taken a break to have children it was something she was keen to leverage in her new role. As a result, in 2001, in collaboration with Sky and the Daily Express, HSBC launched ‘Startup Stars’: a competition designed to encourage entrepreneurship, offering a £25,000 cash prize for the best new business. Startups and entrepreneurs have become a sexy thing recently, enthuses Rendle, but we’ve been doing this for six years. The BBC copied us with ‘Dragon’s Den’.
‘Startup Stars’ culminates with 10 finalists presenting their business plans to a panel of experts in the boardroom of the HSBC building. We grill them, she explains, revealing a fascination for the whole process, and the companies that participate. Indeed, so impressed has she been with the quality of thinking behind one finalist that they have since become a major strategic partner. This was Intelligent Marketing, a finalist in 2004, which was behind the recent ‘Difference in Business’ campaign (see B2BM Oct 06, p7) and upcoming ‘Jellybean’ campaigns for the brand.
‘Startup Stars’ is not the only marketing initiative that HSBC operates with the aim of targeting entrepreneurs or new businesses: far from it in fact. Whilst the rationale for appealing to this audience is pretty obvious (brand and relationship-building for potential future customers), the practicalities are far less straightforward. But this is part of the appeal for Rendle.
Startups is an area that is rich with content and marketing opportunities. It is interesting because you can test different kinds of media to see how they play out. We are testing a number of things at the moment, including running online tutorials. She also expresses an interest in digital TV, and points out that HSBC recently launched its first podcast.
Whilst these various digital marketing tools have different strengths, weaknesses and dynamics, they are generally being used with one objective in mind: to position the bank as a provider of general business advice to startups. This has become one of the cornerstone’s of HSBC’s strategy for reaching this audience. However, the advice does not come from the bank directly; Rendle explains that it is not allowed to directly advise businesses on non-financial matters, but it can facilitate their interaction with third parties who can. As a result, the bank has come to rely on partnerships, working in different ways with different organisations.
For example, it offers news feeds via Business Hotline Publications, has worked with women’s business network Aurora to run events, and has worked with Eve magazine on editorial. These last two relationships indicate that women are seen as a key startup audience.
The Government indicates that there are up to 700,000 women in the UK who could start up their own business, Rendle explains. We can’t talk to all of them, but are trying to be proactive to speak to them in their space. The impact is bigger than just the people you have there in the room for the events. There is a trickle-down effect for the brand. The bank has also organised its own events, with speakers including Anita Roddick and Margaret Hodge.
The focus on women is logical in that it facilitates multiple communication channels and enables the bank to be pragmatic in how it addresses them. But the fact that Rendle herself was once an entrepreneur and therefore relates to this audience is surely no coincidence.
As important and exciting as they are, startups are obviously only one of the bank’s target audiences. Rendle is responsible for all HSBC’s marketing to companies with up to £750 million turnover: a vast audience, encompassing over one million existing customers, and rising. However, the tactics with which it is seeking to engage with this audience are increasingly similar to those used for pre-starts; specifically online and events. A recent initiative has been the development of specialist banking centres for SMEs, moving this function out of the retail bank space, and providing specialist relationship managers. This can be viewed as a fundamental step: acknowledging that there are differences between talking to consumers and talking to businesses. We’ve done lots of realigning propositions, she says.
For 2007, we’re specifically looking at a programme of events for the middle-market on the subject of doing business internationally, Rendle explains. This, she proudly admits, dovetails beautifully with HSBC’s brand positioning as ‘The world’s local bank’. She is adamant that this unashamedly global positioning reflected in the ‘Difference in Business’ campaign is not a turnoff for smaller businesses or even startups. The message is that we are a big bank, but we understand that businesses are different and are unique. Because we have relationship managers, we can help you.
She also refutes that the overwhelmingly consumer orientation of much of the bank’s advertising is a hinderence. Seventy per cent of our business customers are still on loan conversion. They are banking with us personally. The brand has a halo effect.
Such loyalty towards an employer and brand could easily come across as cynical posturing, particularly from someone so senior in such a large organisation. But with Rendle it is entirely believable: she appears entirely content and happy with her role. I’m afraid I love my job, she admits, with an air of almost embarrassment, and HSBC is an excellent place to be. I’ve got a fantastic opportunity to influence and change things, and make things happen. This can provide a huge amount of satisfaction.
Whilst she may not have begun her career in marketing, she is very clear that this is where she sees her future. I love marketing. I love how it can change your views of the world it is a very powerful tool.
But is there still a challenge here at HSBC, after six years? Most certainly. There are things here which I don’t feel I’ve got fully right. For example, I’d like to make more use of ‘e’ marketing this is a fascinating space, and it’s the next focus for us. You have an idea today and its been done by someone else tomorrow. It’s a very big learning curve. I want to develop myself and take my team with me.
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