CommBank looks to limit brand damage with ad campaign
Commonwealth Bank today kicked off a major advertising campaign as it looks to limit the damage to its brand amid the multi-million dollar financial planning scandal.
But industry observers have warned that the full page ads in newspapers may be too little too late to save and restore the bank’s battered reputation.
The ads, the work of M&C Saatchi, feature an open letter from chief executive Ian Narev in which he apologises for the scandal which saw financial planners put customers’ money into high risk investments without their permission.
Along with the apology, Narev announced the beginning of the Open Advice Review Program, pledging “an assessment of the advice received, access to an independent customer advocate and an independent panel of review”.
Oh for f?$&’s sake shut up.
Nothing the the bank did would have been enough for you baying bastards.
Nothing.
Won’t work and will cause more damage
Putting aside the sluggish response of the CBA to respond to this, the actual “solution” itself is a farce.
If you are one of the people who have been given dodgy advice by CBA financial planners, then the process as per their website is to send your complaint to their review program where it will be reviewed by a CBA team. Huh? You’re meant to trust the very guys that ripped you off??
It gets even more farcical.. once the CBA has completed their review you will receive an offer to meet with “an independant customer advocate funded by the Commonwealth Bank”… the bank appoints and pays for the “independant” reviewer! So they are neither independant nor a customer advocate!
Can’t wait for the first person to be dissatisfied with CBA’s solution and “independant” customer advocate and take them to court.. the CBA will have a hard time convincing anyone how it can be acting properly when it appoints and pays for the “independant” advocate.
Surely they should have and could have approached the Australian Shareholders Association or some other body to appoint an independant advocate.
This is becoming more an more a textbook example of how not to do crisis communications.
Farce.
Waste of time and money. The damage is done and may even spread. I was looking at another financial group last week, and saw their chairman was a past Comm Bank heavy weight, so that’s it I will not go near them. The damage done has impacted so many lives, a few adverts will not fix this and the CEO just looks an ‘air-head’.
The share price continues to rise.
No-one really trusts banks to look after their customers anyway. Surveys which say they do are carefully worded. Given their profits, it is clear they care more about this then anything else.
And many if not most customers are shareholders of all of the major banks anyway. As reality said, the share price is still rising. So most customers just accept it as “the way, it is”. If you are a customer and a shareholder, it often feels like a zero sum game.
In the end, consumer outrage will pass. I think it’s prudent for the politicians to ensure proper regulations exist that prevent this sort of behaviour in the future. Unfortunately, it seems like if anything, the politicians want to pare back these regulations.
Hey Blah Blah Blah…what they could have done, is instead of making this an ‘opt-in’ process, they could voluntarily contact the people affected (the bank knows precisely who they are…some of them elderly and some of them now dead) and offer reparations to those people or their estate. So no…this is not good enough. As with any ‘opt in’ system that is technology based and requires proactivity on behalf of the complainant, a lot of people are going to remain without the compensation they are due. And the bank is counting on it for their bottom line. Very cynical ploy.