A small step can lead to a paradigm shift in an organization. For Emirates NBD, building long-term brand love was a movement that changed internal and external communications to be designed in a way that keeps consumer engagement and experience at the heart of every piece of content.
Supporting brand love with product communication
Over the last ten years, we have collaborated with Emirates NBD to develop content that supports their vision of creating opportunities to prosper for their customers, people, and communities.
At every stage, we looked at communication from a strategic problem-solving lens that always kept customer engagement at the center of the idea and execution.
How to Videos: Research showed an ever-increasing call center volume and expenses. We realized that people do not read the information available on the bank’s website and keep dialing the call centers for the smallest of queries. When Emirates NBD came to us with this problem, we proposed to engage with customers more holistically: Bring about a behavioral change in customer interaction, reduce the bank’s bottom line, create a positive impact, and help their 17 million customers.
The root cause of low attention span was addressed by making banking simple, accessible, and delivered in the form of edutainment, help content, visually engaging storytelling formats, and design-thinking-led creative executions.
We created an uncomplicated, easy-to-recreate, yet cost-effective design guidelines, using which we covered around 2000+ banking topics in the form of How to Videos. These videos were hosted on Emirates NBD’s YouTube channel and shared as emailers and SMS's. The huge success of this initiative in the form of growing SEO, reduced call center volumes, and enhanced customer satisfaction - led to the bank considering video content as their primary medium to drive the objective of brand love.
Shake N Save
Emirates NBD commissioned us to promote one of their most innovative products, Shake N Save, designed to transform the region’s behavior from impulse spending to ‘impulse saving’. We leveraged the insight that every impulsive behavior is connected to momentary happiness which we creatively manifested as a happy dance. We created an entertaining music video showcasing signature dance movements, and it went viral. Our elaborate production plan with multiple locations across the UAE, and involving choreographers, dancers and talents from different ethnicities coming together to create a fun video. Viewers were encouraged to try out impulse saving, projecting it as a healthy habit with the proposition that ‘Saving can be fun and exciting’.
Auto Loans
While on a brand level, Emirates NBD was doing campaigns like "It Wasn’t Me" and Give Into Giving, which were impactful, we supported the brand in extending the same impact to product marketing like Auto Loans, where we personalized the storytelling to address different customer archetypes. We identified talents that suit these archetypes to create engaging video stories set in multiple locations that depicted their lifestyles and personalities. Be it animated storytelling or customer stories; we told em all.
Financial Literacy
Emirates NBD has always been striving to inculcate healthy financial habits in the community it serves. We supported their initiative by creating engaging animated content aiding financial literacy that would help normal people understand the concept of saving, spending, borrowing, and investing wisely. We simplified financial jargon with an animated design-based approach which made it consumable for everyone on different platforms. Forty-five animated stories were created across different buckets and seeded every week to celebrate financial wellness month.
To strengthen consumer understanding, we also developed a frame-by-frame animated video that could live on Emirates NBD’s site for people to always refer to.
Wealth Management
Functional differentiation for brands is always short-lived. Emirates NBD always understood that, which is why most product campaigns use insight-driven storytelling. Based on the insight that most people tend to seek or give unsolicited financial advice; we used humor to connect with our audience for Emirates NBD’s Wealth Management. We hired experienced actors who brought the protagonists to life. And with efficient pre-production, three films were shot in a single day at multiple locations to ensure optimum budget usage.
Personal Banking
Getting the bank for the production buck spent is a unique aspect of Liwa’s boutique production setup; owing to having in-house producers, line producers, directors, and creative & strategic minds, Liwa tends to reduce the production house margins the client would otherwise end up spending.
We cracked an unusual visual treatment to promote Emirates NBD’s Beyond benefits and conceptualized and produced three engaging digital films involving heavy production design in record time.
Ambient Content
Emirates NBD wanted to transform its retail spaces to enhance its physical customer interactions. Keeping in mind shopper marketing strategies, we designed a series of visually appealing ambient content to engage people in and around the Emirates NBD branches across the UAE and generate awareness.
Emirates NBD always tapped into Liwa’s expertise and understanding of creating creative content for outdoor spaces where there are several challenges like curved screens, screens with different viewing angles, daylight & nighttime viewing, moving traffic, visibility, geographic customer profile, etc.
We have supported the brand in bringing alive its tactical campaigns like U by Emaar, Marriott Bonvoy cards, and Emirati package in these spaces.
How did we make creating hundreds of video assets cost-effective?
We always applied the ‘design thinking lens’ when adapting tactical and branded content to outdoor screens as it guided us in developing an optimized storyboard that could be easily adapted to different languages and screen sizes, making this exercise cost-effective.
EXPO 2020
It was time for the greatest show Dubai has ever put up for the world, the EXPO 2020. We at Liwa were entrusted with this prestigious task of understanding consumer behavior and creating grappling video content that put Emirates NBD in the forefront of innovation as the Bank of the future.
We deep-dived
and studied every single innovative exhibit like Green Citizenship, Urban Farming, Creative Marketplace, Quantum Computing & Data Economy,
which were developed in partnership with IBM, SAP, AVAYA, DELL, and Microsoft, to create simple to understand introductory videos to be played inside the exhibits that explained these futuristic concepts for the masses and generated footfall in the branch.
We overcame several challenges like visitors entering from different directions by mapping consumer journey touchpoints across EXPO, drastically different screen specs and sizes, the complexity of the exhibits by delving deep into these aspects with the brand team and creating customized content adhering to shopper marketing insights across 500 screens around the EXPO site reaching 22.9 million visitors. Each screen specification and location were considered uniquely to deliver the relevant message with a call to action for optimum viewing, like the Step screens, Dubai Exhibition Center screens, Metro Access screens, etc.
We also developed around 60 thematic videos for the screens, which covered various occasions like National Day, Chinese New Year, Women’s day, etc. These designs were developed keeping in mind the thematic of the occasion it was being played on.
Social & Tactical Campaigns
We understand how important it is to engage customers on social media and create differentiation on a brand level where the market is oversaturated and transactional. Therefore, we always look at simple tactical briefs like Fly for Free, with a design lens, to ensure the content beautifully communicates our story.
Several tactical campaigns aimed at increasing the usage of cards and the acquisition of new customers are developed every quarter by banks. How did we make these engaging?
We leveraged viral trends on social media like Guess the Gibberish and created entertaining branded content for spending and acquisition.
Opening an account with Emirates NBD is easier than doing most chores in our daily lives!
How did we manage to communicate this effectively? The funny and relatable stock footage showing everyday scenarios that take ages to accomplish were used to create these promoted social stories of Easy Account Opening.
What did we do when Emirates NBD wanted to communicate the benefits of having the Etihad card, the Marriott Bonvoy Card, or, for that matter, the Emirati Card? We creatively mixed assets from partner brands, stock imagery, and 2D animated graphics. We used text overlays to effectively communicate and create video assets seeded on social media and adapted to several BTL touch points.
Catchment Area Content
Certain new branches were facing a footfall issue and wanted to generate awareness in the catchment area. Instead of just putting out social posts mentioning that the branch is now open in this mall, we visited the mall that the branch was in and discovered there were a lot of interesting things to do in the mall. With the help of the branch manager, we crafted an engaging story showcasing all the cool things people could do there and subtly invited people to come and drop by our branch. The communication was based on an insight that people care about their life and enjoyment, and they consider a brand when you are adding value to their everyday life.
Employee Branding
With a growing emphasis on employee engagement and being an employer of choice, employee branding content has gained immense popularity today. Developing more content series like ‘More Than Just Bankers’, which uses storytelling to humanize the bank and the employees who serve the organization and the community.
Brand Story
Emirates NBD is expanding its operations to various countries worldwide and wanted to create an unconventional corporate video to be a curtain raiser in high-profile events. We put together an engaging story shot across various iconic locations in UAE with an effective 3-day production plan which unfolded the story in a not-so-corporate way!
While most banks take a narrow perspective, Emirates NBD looks beyond campaign targets and numbers and works towards a bigger mission of ‘creating opportunities to prosper. With 17 million customers and a presence in 13 countries, their brand love has been consistently on the rise.
We wanted to combine two best practices: Show rather than tell, helping the bank climb higher on search engine results. And designing communication around consumer insights. It resulted in higher consumption of content, high SEO and CERT ratings, and contributed to the bottom line. For instance, our ‘How To’ videos reduced call center costs by 30%.
Creating consumer-centric content drove online and mobile registrations and activations to grow by 53%; customer knowledge about products and services enhanced significantly - helping to position the bank as the category thought leader and one of the most innovative banks in the region.
Leveraging humor and building a connection to complex topics like wealth management led to exponential growth in social media interaction – in terms of followers, views, and clicks.
And by enhancing visual interaction with digital screens in physical retail spaces, the bank reinvented branches of the future.
Emirates NBD’s constant drive to connect with their customers, excel in their communication, and build brand affinity won the bank recognition across global awards - including Effie’s, New York Festivals, and Dubai Lynx. Forbes also recognized the bank as one of the ‘World’s Best Regarded Companies.’
A befitting tribute to a bank that’s innovative, connected, and futuristic.
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