Citibank goes wild for the public [GALLERY]

For the past two years, Citibank has looked for new ways to draw in eyeballs.“The emerging affluent is a completely new audience for us," said Priscilla Ng (pictured), country marketing director of Citibank Global Consumer Banking."To be honest, we’re a bit of a late-comer into the market, so the question has always been how to do it well. We wanted to challenge the status quo.”Aside from corporate changes like extending office hours and opening more service counters, Ng also digitalised one of its improved services – she put the percentage of phone calls that were answered within 20 seconds (a strategy she learned from an airline who’d publicise the number of on-time flights).The media mix, she added, has also slowly been moving from traditional media to digital because “the affluent is usually located in pretty much a few areas in Hong Kong while salary workers are everywhere.”Recently, for example, it entered into a collaboration with a local artist to promote a new debit card online.On the retail front, it transformed its storefront into a clothing store with summer sales to – in Ng’s words – “make the bank more fun and dynamic because banking shouldn’t be boring.”A parody video of bank staff strutting their moves in fashionable clothing on a catwalk was also used.Close to the end of the year, it dressed its windows with a Halloween façade, and in Christmas, a Santa Claus-Fortune Master crossover display. From April to June this year, it pumped out its spotlight campaign to really target the mass with a salary-worker appreciation push called “Work Hard Play Hard”.“We take innovation very seriously. It’s the spirit of our bank, I suppose,” said Ng. “Our competitors are always hot on heels, so we’re always striving to do something new and exciting.”[gallery ids="17294,17293,17292,17291"]