5. Brand trust and bankers

Building brand trust is essential to get customers to trust you enough to become customers. But this principle doesn't just apply to customers.

We fruitlessly spent a huge amount of effort in the early days trying to get UK banks to talk to us about building direct bank feed connections to Xero. We were the first to launch direct bank feeds in the UK with HSBC in 2009, and then there was this long, fallow period of around 5 years before the next direct feed finally arrived.

It wasn’t that we weren’t trying. None of the big banks wanted to talk to us, nobody wanted to know.

And then one day in 2014, the people we’d been trying to engage at various banks suddenly started calling and emailing us back.

What had changed?

Well, it turns out that nothing validates a brand more in the mind of a banker than a 60x30cm sheet of cardboard with an advert printed on it and placed inside a London Underground Tube car.

And that week, we’d just launched our first-ever UK advertising test on the Tube. And bankers commute just like everyone else.

And had I thought about it differently, I’d probably have run some hyper-local targeted ads on the handful of bus shelters and other street-level advertising spaces located immediately outside the entrances to all the banks’ headquarters in London.

And nowhere else.

Buying up space on 3 or 4 bus shelter panels on the pavements around Bishopsgate or Canary Wharf probably wouldn’t have cost very much at all, and we could have afforded to do this quite a lot earlier than the big spend required for a city-wide Tube campaign.

And then I remembered a breakfast conversation I’d had about four years earlier with Craig Winkler, the founder and CEO of Australia’s MYOB and later an investor and board member at Xero.

Over some muesli one morning, Craig told me the story of when they were building out MYOB’s brand, they chose to advertise on buses in Melbourne, but only on the routes with the highest business population density where commuters and businesspeople would travel back and forth to their offices, and would therefore be more likely to be stuck behind a bus, confronted with the MYOB advert for a minute or so. And they’d automatically assume that MYOB was established and everywhere.

This isn’t rocket science, but in our case, I had missed the opportunity to think about the CEOs and divisional managers inside banks we wanted to work with as potential targets for our advertising.

Not a mistake I will make again.