20 September 2010 808 words, 4 min. read

Crédit Agricole: why I don’t understand their communication on Facebook

By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab PhD in marketing, director of IntoTheMinds
After I published my post on Crédit Agricole, I got several comments (one of them from the Crédit Agricole itself) which call for a more detailed argumentation. Here are the main points of concerns I was dealing with in my […]

After I published my post on Crédit Agricole, I got several comments (one of them from the Crédit Agricole itself) which call for a more detailed argumentation.

Here are the main points of concerns I was dealing with in my previous post:

  1. the communication campaign called “Frein’Art” doesn’t’ allow to stress the values of the banking industry and doens’t draw on the empirical results obtained in the field of service quality as far as appearances are concerned
  2. the message contained in the “Frein’Art” communication campaign is not consistent with the very work of an insurance / banking company

Part 1: appearances are crucial

Let’s start with the beginning. I wrote that appearances are crucial when a consumer judges a firm and in particular its service.  It has been shown in numerous studies (Voss et al, 2004; Vilares & Coehlo, 2003; Van der Weile et al, 2002) that the quality of service deeply influences the customer satisfaction.  Newman & Cowling (1996) proved the link between service quality and profitability.  All studies dedicated to the antecedents of service quality (among them Dabholkar et al, 1996) have proved the importance of appearances, Wong et Sohal (2003) even concluded that appearances are more important that all other antecedents.

It is therefore well proved that appearances play a major  (if not the most important) role in service quality, which impacts satisfaction and therefore loyalty.

Crédit Agricole should therefore check more carefully its communication and make sure that the impression conveyed is aligned with the values of the company.

Part 2: consistency

I do understand that a brand wants to attract the attention of prospects and that it may be tempted to follow an original and sometimes provocative way of communication.  I’m just wondering, although I have no scientific arguments, whether this makes sense. One of my readers wrote that the professionalism of a well known Brussels-based marketing professor is not put into question just because he uses funny and original slides.  It’s true. His professionalism and his way of presenting are two different things.  You can allow yourself to be very creative in the way you communicate as long as the content still makes sense and has value for your audience.  And this is what I criticizes in the Crédit Agricole campaign. There is no meaningful content. It has disappeared and has been replaced by purposeless appearances.

In his comment, the Facebook responsible of the Crédit Agricole points out that they have done actions using social media.

Let me deal in particular with the example he gave in regards to the iPhone app (see this post on another blog).  Apparently the launch of the iPhone app was not done without problems and the Crédit Agricole had to take the app back from the Apple store.  The Crédit Agricole then decided to communicate with consumers and potential users via Facebook.  Social media are indeed useful to interact with customers and to have a “dialogue of equals” to quote Normann and Ramirez (1993) who in my opinion invented the meaning of “co-creation” (although my research indicated that the word itself was first used in 1995 by Schrage). Interacting with customers is certainly very positive (and I will never criticize any company which is doing that) but is it really co-creation as the authors of the blog Stan & Dan (see link above) suggest.  I don’t think so.  It can only be co-creation when a value is generated for both parties involved.  I’m following here an economic definition of co-creation which is given in what seems to be the first empirical research on the subject (published in May 2010 in the Journal of Marketing).  The questions remains to know whether those interactions generated value. They certainly did for the bank which was able to modify the app but what about the users? Did they get any value from the interaction beyond the mere corrections made to the app.  I can’t answer the latter. I only see there were interactions (see the snapshot from Facebook above) but I believe there should have been other ways to involve customers to troubleshoot the app.

My take:

The underlying assumption of my post was that communication has more value when it is aligned with the intrinsic values of an industry or of a firm. In an industry like banking, which has lost a lot of credibility after the financial crisis, my take is that great attention should be dedicated to appearances. The latter should be thoroughly thought of.

I understand however that a brand wants to get attention by launching an original and -under certain aspects- provocative campaign.  It can however be done without loosing the very substance of the message. When there is content you are given a great flexibility in terms of format for your marketing campaign.



Posted in Marketing.

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