Portraying Their Cards Right: NatWest Bank

The Challenge

B2B advertising doesn’t get much duller on paper than point-of-sale card systems, so the real work was making retailers care anyway. Introduce a new point-of-sale card system to four key retail segments as an initial test prior to rolling the system out to all national retailers. The challenge for this B2B advertising campaign was straightforward on the surface, generate leads among retailers, but harder in practice: card processing systems aren’t a category retailers get excited about, and any B2B advertising approach that leaned on technical specs alone was destined to blend into every other vendor pitch already landing on their desks.

Our Solution

Response print advertising was the best way to leverage the NatWest brand and its trustworthiness for lead generation, and it became the backbone of the B2B advertising strategy. The breadth of the platform was illustrated within different industries by juxtaposing relevant retail products to their plastic imitations, turning an inherently dry subject into something visually memorable. The four vertical segment test was a significant success and subsequently rolled out across other retail segments, resulting in incremental market share and revenue for NatWest, and expanded retail opportunities for their customers. See more of our work making dry, technical categories memorable in our Ameritech case study.