Private banks speak more about themselves than they do about their clients. Moreover, they hardly differentiate and they tend to use the same language: these are some of the findings of a study we conducted based on a quantitative analysis of the marketing brochures of 10 private banks*.

In fact, marketing brochures are a formidable proxy to analyze a bank’s strategy. They reflect what a bank stands for and what it aims at offering in terms services for its clients. Analyzing their content reveals how they differentiate or rather how they resemble each other.

The full study “Differentiation and Positioning in Private Banking” is available on Arvetica.com.

How does an average private bank communicate?

Our study shows that the best way not to differentiate is 1) to emphasize traditional soft values such as commitment, discretion, honesty, or stability and (2) to highlight the prestige of an institution by using words like achievement, awards, leading or reputation. These findings were obtained based on a statistical discourse analysis tool, which we developed for this study. It combines 10 soft criteria, such as prestige, independence or personalization and 13 product and service categories, such as active advisory, mutual funds, alternative investments or family office.

Key findings

Our research reveals three main findings:

• Communications Styles. We have identified three different communication styles among the analyzed banks: the Prestige-Oriented, the Process-Oriented and the Performance-Oriented. Interestingly, a third of the analysed institutions don’t refer to investment performance at all.
• Us & You. A majority of banks in the sample communicate from an institution perspective rather than from a client perspective. A third of the analysed banks take a client perspective and address clients in a direct form with you and your.
• Claiming Excellence. All analyzed banks claim to be leading institutions and extensively use adjectives and superlatives such as best, award-winning, leading, renowned or superior. As a consequence, using superlatives has an insignificant impact on differentiation.

Excerpt of the research study

One interesting aspect of our research is that it shows how strongly some banks take a client perspective and speak to clients in a direct form, while others don’t at all. This can be shown by comparing the number of times an institution uses the terms our and we versus the number of times they use you and your. This is illustrated in figure 1 below.

figure 1: our/we vs. you/your

This finding becomes even more striking when the data is presented through a visual method called tag-clouding. Tag clouds give a visual sense for the content of a document by emphasizing frequent words through larger fonts and infrequent words through small fonts. Compare the tag-clouds for the two Swiss banks Credit Suisse (cf. figure 2) and Mirabaud (cf. figure 3) below. Do you see the difference?

figure 2: tag cloud for Credit Suisse

figure 3: tag cloud for Mirabaud

Differentiation opportunities

This research was designed to help executives detect possibilities to differentiate. There are many differentiation opportunities and market share to be taken by those banks that dare to position themselves.

Purchase the full report or contact us for a customized assessment of your communication material.

* institutions analyzed in the study include Clariden Leu, Credit Suisse, Julius Bär, Merrill Lynch (Suisse), Mirabaud, Pictet, Sarasin, Schroders, Syz, UBS

Popularity: 66% [?]