Starling Bank: How the Free Birds of Banking Became Britain’s Favourite
With its rich colour grade, vast locations, whimsical effects, tasteful palette of tones and textures and soaring cinematography, Starling Bank’s current campaign oozes craft and quality. And that’s no accident.
The ‘neobank’, founded in 2014 by financial industry pioneer Anne Boden, has undergone several phases, from disruptive startup, to scale up, and now, with over a million customers in the UK and having won ‘Best British Bank’ four years in a row at the British Bank Awards, they’re realising their ambition to go toe-to-toe with the old school of the UK’s banking sector. And that means bringing together their customer-centric innovation with the hallmarks of trust and credibility, growing their appeal beyond edgy early adopters to business owners and families.
Back when it launched, Starling was viewed as being part of a niche club of neobanks, pitted against the likes of Monzo. But Starling wanted to soar higher than that. And from a marketing perspective they’ve been working hard with their agency partners Wonderhood Studio to combine the ‘freedom’ of their proposition while also building trust and earning a reputation.
“We wanted to compete with the big guys,” says brand director Rachel Kerrone. “We wanted to take what they were doing really well and then take to the party what we were doing really well, which was the innovation and technology and all the features that genuinely help customers. It was taking the best of both worlds and creating a category for ourselves. It was almost putting Starling in this space that nobody had ever been in before and creating a category of one. That was very deliberate from quite early on and it feels like, as we’ve grown, we’ve taken over more and more of that space.”
Rachel says that the approach is working. Trust numbers have grown and she says that in December they were higher than they’ve ever been. “When you’re a bank and you’re looking after people’s money, trust is one of the most important things for customers,” she says. “A lot of that comes back to the point about the creative feeling really cinematic. It was really deliberate, because you trust in a brand that you see as credible and good quality and you see them in premium positions. That’s been a very deliberate part of the brand strategy.”
It’s been quite some journey for the brand, and also for Rachel, who joined Starling from the traditional banking world. She was looking for something with more purpose and where she could see an opportunity to create positive change - and had also admired Anne and followed her journey closely. “I think it was a combination of wanting to do something a bit more purposeful where I felt like I could genuinely make some change, and also working with the only woman to have ever founded a bank in the UK.”
Over the past four and a half years, Rachel has steered the brand’s marketing through different strategic channels and scaled up the reach and breadth of the campaigns. But one thing has remained constant.
“I guess what has stayed the same is staying true to our mission. Anne set up Starling in the first place to change banking for good and to change an industry that hadn’t been changed for a very long time. It’s very, very customer-centric. Banking hadn’t been treating customers well for a long time. Banks were very unpopular, banks were not cool. The whole premise behind Starling was to do the right thing. Everyone that works at Starling is very much part of that and believes in the values and feels like they’re on this mission to change banking for good. It’s always felt like we’ve had that North Star from the beginning.”
It’s a brand that hinges upon customer experience and functionality, and the culture, says Rachel, is very much engineer led. Those engineers that first built the bank are still there, which allows them to be responsive and agile. One very relevant example is a bit of pandemic innovation, the Connected Card. It allowed those who are isolating to give an additional card to family member or friend who were shopping for groceries on their behalf. “It was really tapping into how people were feeling, what customers needed at that particular point in time and really being able to be responsive to that,” says Rachel.
One wonders how the culture of customer-centric innovation impacts the marketing team, but as well to ask a fish how water influences it. This culture is the water in which Starling swims - or to be more species-accurate, the air in which it flies.
“There’s this cross pollination across the business,” explains Rachel. “It’s just part of it naturally, I guess, and quite a big part of it. In terms of the way we work, I work really closely with the CIO for example and our head of data science, as well as colleagues in marketing and comms and our social and PR team. It’s quite an interesting mix. We don’t just work as a marketing team that’s quite isolated. We’re really ingrained, and the product teams, the engineering teams are a big part of it - not just an influence.”
Having such a close working relationship with the chief information officer and head of data science has been ‘incredibly useful’. Rachel can see what features people are using and loving, and use that to talk to other people who aren’t using them. And during the pandemic they were able to see changes in customer behaviour and spending habits and react accordingly. It also means that the team can respond quickly with new tools and products and features.
Indeed, that cross-pollination goes in multiple directions. For the recent brand platform ‘here to change’, one of the key starting points was to interview people around the business about working at Starling, what they felt about the brand what was important to them.
“Thankfully, because it’s one of the things that is our mission, one of the things that came through loud and clear from everyone was this need to be always changing things for the better and improving on things. Again, it’s got a really optimistic feel,” says Rachel. “So our brand platform is called ‘Here to Change’, and it’s all around taking people from the old way of doing things, having to queue at old banks, 5pm closing times, being unable to get hold of anyone at the weekend- all those things that we’ve all put up with for years - and then we’re showing people that, actually, without knocking those competitors, we’re actually showing people this sense of freedom and flight you get when you bank with Starling. Everything embodies the ease and freedom and being able to do all your banking on the go: you don’t have to stand in the queue, you don’t have to take loads of printouts or things. It’s that feeling of weightlessness as you emerge from this old banking world.”
This new brand platform has helped Starling bring together its general audience marketing and its more targeted messages. The hero spot, Set Yourself Free, sees a stylish, pixie cut-sporting woman bored in a queue in a musty, stuffy, beige bank. She becomes freed from the constraints of gravity, soaring upwards, through the glass ceiling to experience flight and freedom. Other iterations aimed at small business owners repeat this low gravity vibe.
It’s all striking a chord with the British public. And as the UK economy faces rising interest rates and a cost of living squeeze - and the inescapable Buy Now Pay Later offerings online challenge people’s ability to save, Starling is gearing up to follow through on its customer-centric promise. The key is to create practical tools and useful nudges, whether its the Round Up feature that rounds every purchase up to the nearest pound and saves the difference or an education series called Money Explained, which is intended to help people make their money go further.
“I think the great thing about Starling is that there are lots of practical features so instead of just telling people you should spend less and save more, there are things like spending analytics so you can see exactly what you’ve spent just by tapping your app it’ll tell you exactly what you’ve spent,” says Rachel.
One of the big comms challenges for the brand is tackling the inertia behind switching bank accounts. People tend to open bank accounts in their teens or as students and just sort of stay despite there being better alternatives out there. It’s been a big brand awareness project for Starling over the last couple of years and last year they ran a campaign called ‘Break Up with Your Bank’. Indeed, notes Rachel, people can often stay with their bank longer than they stay with their spouse.
Looking forward, Rachel says that while every year in Starling’s relatively short eight year existence has been big, the team have huge ambitions and hopes for 2022. They’re partnering with the Women’s Euro 2022 as official sponsors and plenty of new campaigns lined up. And with voting open for the British Bank Awards 2022, it remains to be seen whether Starling can make it for a fifth year running as Best British Bank.
