Commonwealth Bank: A Customer-Centric Multinational Essay.

For this assessment task students need to develop a media plan for an Australian organization. The goal of the  medial plan is basically to find the combination of media that enables the marketer to communicate the message in the most effective way to the
largest number of potential audiences at the lowest cost.

The students need to follow the 4 steps below and develop a media plan.
1. profiling/selecting the target market
2. specifying media objectives
3. selecting media categories and vehicles
4. determining media costs.

It is highly recommended that you read various academic materials. You will be expected to have consulted books, at least 10 relevant and recent academic journal articles, conference proceedings, market reports and so on to prepare your report. 

Customer Centric Approach of Commonwealth Bank

Commonwealth Bank is an Australian multinational bank with its operations expanded in worldwide locations. Majorly, their operations are expanded in Asia, New Zealand, and United States and in the United Kingdom market along with the variety of financial services. These services include investment planning, insurance, superannuation, funds management, and common activities like retail, institutional and business banking. In 2015, organization also achieved the benchmark of being the largest company in Australia on the Australian Securities Exchange. It was founded by Australian government in 1911 which was fully privatised in 1996 and today, it is counted in the top four banks in the Australia with National Australia Bank, ANZ Baking Group and Westpac. Organization is behemoth player of banking industry and with more than 52,000 employees; organization is rendering numerous services as per their target audience’s demands and wants as well as to provide them unique banking experience (Commonwealth Bank, 2018).

In order to enhance customer satisfaction as well as to build an effective brand image amongst their customers, organization has adopted customer centric approach. Organizational CEO has marked customer service on priority with the objective of gaining positive outcomes as well as for the objective of enhancing developing an effective brand image amongst their customer’s mind-set. This helps the organization to retain its existing and potential customers along with approaching to other customer segments. Organization has adopted a vibrant and customer focused and high-integrity culture at their workplace to mark the customers as their priority. In relation with this, organization focuses on building effective media plans along with investing in talent management, people development in order to make their employees’ skills diversified in consideration to the customer satisfaction approach.

In order to match up with the customer’s requirements and dynamic business trends, organization has adopted world-class technology. This not only helps the organization to fulfil their needs but it also plays pivotal role in terms of enhancing organizational image amongst the customers. In order to communicate with its customers, organization has adopted applications that leverage real-time capabilities and determining news ways for interacting with them. Their analytic insights are the primary tool through which they offer more value to customers along with providing greater stability to them. Usage of technology is also essential in terms of enhancing the organizational productivity which is one of the great measures for attaining competitive advantage (Commonwealth Bank, 2018).

Segmentation is the process of segregating large part of target audience into small groups on the basis of their demands, preferences, buying behaviour and interest. With the help of segmentation, organization could easily analyse its suitable target market segments which could be approached for the purpose of enhancing demand for the particular products and services. As per the functionalities of Commonwealth Bank, their target market segments will be those people who have sufficient disposable income and looking for right way to invest their money for securing their future, business organizations who requires a platform for transacting domestically as well as internationally, etc. Apart from this, Commonwealth Bank also renders numerous services through which they could easily approach to a larger part of the target market. Following are the primary target market segments for the Commonwealth Bank:

World-Class Technology for Enhanced Customer Experience

In this section, people are segregated on the basis of age, sex, income, religion, etc. In relevance to this, Australian population is less of millennials and young age group in comparison to the people aged more than 55. Thus, organization could easily target all age group people of Australia as they have variety of services. For young age group, organization renders funds management, investment and other schemes through which they could easily secure their future. Apart from this, old age group people are already more attracted towards savings and organization provides multiple saving plans through which organization could approach to the large segment of Australian population. Organization also offers insurance plans which are another one of the basic requirement for an individual to cover the unexpected losses. Thus, organization offer number of services through which multiple customer segments could easily be targeted (Commonwealth Bank, 2018).

Organization serves in all areas of Australia, thus, they serve all segments of the market i.e. Australian citizens, international clients, business organizations, etc. With regards to this, organization provide extra benefits to its existing customers in terms of reward points for the objective of retaining them along with the objective of enhancing organizational performance.

These are brand loyal people and in order to target and retain brand loyal people, it is necessary to serve high quality services along with the objective of regularly update their services. This helps the organization to target its potential and existing customers and rendering high quality services also helps the organization to retain its customers for the objective of enhancing its brand image amongst the customer segments.

People seek for benefit sought and they also seek for the fulfilment of their needs and wants. In order to enhance organizational performance, it is required to deliver the same services which are required by their target customers. Thus, it is necessary for the objective of enhancing organizational performance along with the objective of building brand image amongst the target audience.

Primary objectives with the new media plan for Commonwealth Bank are enhancing its revenues, customer base and to ensure the sustained growth and overall development of the organization in the longer run. It is required for the organization to set up its brand image, spreading awareness amongst the target audience as well as to establish its effective image in the target market through which competitive advantage could be attained along with the objective of building brand loyalty amongst the target audience (Commonwealth Bank, 2018). Following are some of the crucial media objectives with relevance to the new media plan for Commonwealth Bank:

Segmentation for Enhanced Demand

Every strategy is being adopted with the objective of enhancing organizational performance with relevance to spreading awareness amongst the target audience. With the effect of spreading awareness amongst the potential and existing customers, demand for the products would easily be increased. In relation with this, organization needs to develop certain effective advertisement campaigns for the objective of engaging customers with the organization in order to enhance potential and existing customers (Seltzer, 2017).

Bargaining power of consumers is very high in the banking industry because there are large number of banks are present in the banking industry. In order to retain existing customers along with approaching new customer segments, organization needs to create strong brand loyalty amongst the target audience by delivering high quality services as well as by providing unique products and services.

Due to high buyer’s power, organization needs to adopt certain effective media strategies through which target and potential customers could be engaged with the organization for longer run. With relation to this, organization could easily be able to enhance its performance along with accomplishing its desired goals and objectives. Engagement activities include communication strategies, and other advertisement campaigns. With the help of these activities, customers could be actively engaged with the organization through which customers stay brand loyal for the organization that is the positive indicator of enhancing organizational market share.

Amongst the all objectives of media strategies, there is another crucial objective is portraying actual image of the product which is being promoted through different advertisement platforms. In order to enhance the market share and customers base, it is required for the organization to showcase the exact image of the product and service for attracting target audience towards the organization. Apart from this, there is another major benefit is retention of target audience because once a customer attains good quality products and services from the organization, he/she stays with the organization till the time, their experience becomes negative with the organization and vice-versa.

Promotion is one of the objectives of organization in relation to the media strategies. The more promotion will be done, the more chances generate with regards to the increasing customer base and market share in the target market. As Commonwealth bank is one of the largest banks in Australia and it has acquired the leading position in the target market and organization has adopted several digital media strategies in order to promote organizational products and services. Amongst the digital marketing tools, organization has adopted email marketing, third website promotion, and various other digital marketing tools with the objective of approach to the target audience in an effective manner. With regards to this, organization could easily target its potential customers in an effective manner at lowest cost (Roy, Salam Sarker & Parvez, 2015).

Media Strategies for Market Share Growth and Brand Loyalty

Media strategies’ objective is to create brand image amongst the target audience so that when they think for the banking services, Commonwealth Bank could hit their mind first. With regards to building an effective brand image amongst the customer’s mind-sets’, it is necessary for the organization to adopt traditional mediums of advertisement and promotion such as bill boards. With the help of these platforms, organization could easily set up their brand image amongst the target audience which is helpful in creating brand awareness amongst the customers which ultimately helps in enhancing the demand for the organizational products and services, enhancing market share, building brand awareness and gaining competitive advantage. In this tool, organizational logo will be promoted with the brand’s slogan especially with the traditional media strategies in order to develop an effective brand image amongst the target audience (Sasmita & Mohd Suki, 2015).  

Few decades back, organizations were relied on non-traditional mediums of advertisement and promotion. These mediums were also used for communicating with the customers and at that time, customers were not able to share their views and feedbacks with relevance to the products. But with the introduction of internet and technology, organization could easily execute its promotional activities in order to promote organizational products and services in an effective manner and that too at lowest cost. Media categories are segregated into two parts i.e. online and offline mediums.

Online platforms are influenced with internet and technology and the primary advantage of using these platforms is wide reachability, low cost and number of platforms through which advertisement and promotional activities could easily be executed. Following are primary tools of online mediums:

In relation to the branding and promotion, Commonwealth Bank has decided to make their new media plan reasonable in terms of cost and highly effective. In relation with this, major focus of the organization will be towards online platforms as these platforms are cost effective as well as more effective than traditional forms of advertisement. This is the cheapest forms of promotion and in this platform; Commonwealth Bank’s advertisement will be posted on other websites which are mainly operated by the target audience (Dwivedi, Kapoor & Chen, 2015).

This is one of the trending strategies of marketing and promotion. With regards to this, organizations have adopted this channel in the promotional and advertisement campaigns on the top. Users of social media are increasing rapidly and some big social platforms are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc. Amongst these platforms, Facebook is one of the oldest and biggest social media platform and this could be evaluated with the number of users Facebook. From approximately 7.6 billion people across the globe, approximately 2.2 billion people are active users of Facebook which is near to the one third of the total population. Commonwealth Bank is currently using social media platforms for promoting their products and services as these are effective, lost cost and efficient platform through which organization could easily reach to its current and prospective customers (Kasemsap, 2014).

Each social media site has a primary audience, so it is necessary to find out the organizational target audience’s preferences. This ensures that the organizational messages are on the most effective platform for engagement and results (Commonwealth Bank, 2018).   

These are new platforms in the digital marketing tools but these are effective because in a short period of time, subscribers of these channels are huge and that number is increasing with the passage of time. Major players of online entertainment channels are Amazon Prime Video, and Netflix. These channels are effective enough to divert customers’ interest and since the introduction of these channels, demand for television and other channels have been reduced. Thus, Commonwealth Bank could be able to enhance its customer base along with targeting other customer segments (Askoul, Khan & Lalitha, 2016).

Offline mediums or traditional mediums are not much effective in compression to the non-traditional platforms as their reachability, frequency and attractiveness power is not much stronger as online platforms are. Although, Commonwealth Bank’s new media plan will be integration of both traditional as well as non-traditional mediums of marketing in order to target large number of customers as well as for the objective of enhancing organizational market share, retaining its acquired position in the target market, etc. Television, radio, newspaper, magazine, bill boards, pamphlets, etc. are some of the primary tools of traditional media. These tools are not much in trend because in a busy scheduled life, people do not have much time to watch television, read newspaper, etc. Thus, Commonwealth Bank will mainly focus over digital platforms of media in comparison to the traditional media of media (Lee, Moon, Kim & Mun, 2015).

Recommendation and Conclusion

From the discussion conducted in the above section, it can be evaluated that Commonwealth Bank is the largest bank in the Australia and it also operates in other parts of the globe. Although, it is the largest bank but still, they are required to adopt appropriate strategies for the objective of retaining its customers as well as for defending its acquired position in the target market. With regards to this, it has been recommended to the organization to regularly amend their strategies along with determining their target audience’s demands and wants so that appropriate and desired outcomes could be attained along with enhancing customer satisfaction which is one of the primary objectives for the organization.

Thus, it can be concluded that organizations are required to regularly update their media plans with the passage of time along with this, it is required for the organization to select the advertisement and promotional channels wisely and on the basis of consumers’ interest so that appropriate channel could be adopted which have the highest reachability in relation with other platforms of the media.

References:

Askoul, R., Khan, H. U., & Lalitha, V. M. (2016). Cross-functional integration of marketing and information services in banking: a cross-industry comparison. International Journal of Process Management and Benchmarking, 6(1), 57-78.

Commonwealth Bank. (2018). 9 Tips To Build Your Business On Social Media. Retrieved from: https://www.commbank.com.au/guidance/business/tips-to-build-your-business-on-social-media--201608.html.

Commonwealth Bank. (2018). About Commonwealth Bank. Retrieved from: https://www.commbank.com.au/about-us.html?ei=CB-footer_about-commbank.

Commonwealth Bank. (2018). Our company. Retrieved from: https://www.commbank.com.au/about-us/our-company.html?ei=CB-footer_who-we-are.

Dwivedi, Y. K., Kapoor, K. K., & Chen, H. (2015). Social media marketing and advertising. The Marketing Review, 15(3), 289-309.

Kasemsap, K. (2014). The role of social media in the knowledge-based organizations. In Integrating social media into business practice, applications, management, and models(pp. 254-275). IGI Global.

Lee, D., Moon, J., Kim, Y. J., & Mun, Y. Y. (2015). Antecedents and consequences of mobile phone usability: Linking simplicity and interactivity to satisfaction, trust, and brand loyalty. Information & Management, 52(3), 295-304.

Roy, M. K., Salam Sarker, M., & Parvez, S. (2015). Sustainability in Banking Industry: Which way to move?. ASA University Review, 9(2).

Sasmita, J., & Mohd Suki, N. (2015). Young consumers’ insights on brand equity: Effects of brand association, brand loyalty, brand awareness, and brand image. International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management, 43(3), 276-292.

Seltzer, A. J. (2017). Implicit contracts and acquisitions: An econometric case study of the 19th century Australian banking industry. German Journal of Human Resource Management, 31(2), 185-208.