Best marketing campaign

Structured Products Europe Awards 2010

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Peter Frösell, Handelsbanken

Handelsbanken

‘Are you Bull, Bear or Chicken?' is the blunt introduction to a campaign created by Handelsbanken for the sale of its bull and bear certificates. The bank spent little time messing around in a campaign that had been rewarded by Skr7.649 billion (€826 million) of sales by May 2010, according to the bank.

The campaign was built on a huge amount of research, which revealed some surprising results that were immediately integrated into the marketing campaign. "We found that 500,000 Swedes have substantial stock portfolios in individual shares and of those about 250,000 are quite active. They have six or seven stocks in their portfolios, which are traded at least once every month," says Peter Frösell, vice-president and head of business development for structured products at Handelsbanken in Stockholm.

Of this 250,000, 90% were males who traded frequently but did not have a huge amount of savings: "They are gamblers," says Fredrik Bergman, part of business development structured products based in Stockholm. "They weren't afraid to leverage themselves but they didn't want to do it through the option or warrant markets because of implied volatility. They wanted an easier instrument to understand and that is why we came up with the certificates."

The bank also discovered that these investors "lacked a bit of excitement... they were not afraid to leverage themselves but they didn't want to do this through the options market or the warrants market because of things like implied volatility."

With a male target group, Handelsbanken employed a more aggressive marketing strategy. "We used the concept of the old English gentlemen's club and from this came up with the bull/bear campaign," says Bergman. "We humanised the bull and the bear by representing them as people having an arm wrestle."

Handelsbanken started its campaign last October, with the line ‘Playtime is over', which swiftly became ‘Bull, Bear or Chicken?' The message was squarely aimed at male investors aged between 25 and 55.

Handelsbanken may have the most offices in Scandinavia but it attributes the success of this product to its marketing campaign. "This is because the investors that traded them were not only Handelsbanken clients but were online brokers," says Frösell. "We were able to target a lot of online brokerage firms and the certificates enabled Swedish retail clients to trade commodities certificates for the first time."

Exploiting its online presence, the bank used advertisements, mobile websites and even a page on Facebook. "We accessed a lot of mediums: phone rooms, banners and various other channels," says Frösell. "We targeted the areas where our investor group were, so we wouldn't commission a TV commercial during [Sweden's] X Factor."

There is also a range of ‘Bull and Bear' merchandise, such as a poster of the bull and bear with human bodies having an arm wrestle. This is noteworthy because other banks have bought it and now have it in their trading rooms. However, one of the more difficult but useful innovations came with the change of the name of the certificates on the Swedish Stock Exchange.

"The Swedish Stock Exchange has a set standard on how to present notes. There are 13 characters only and it means that with a lot of warrants and exchange traded notes it is difficult to identify the product. We were very careful to avoid this," says Frösell.

"It took us almost a month before the launch to convince the exchange to allow us to have the short and long name the same so they could be easily identified," he explains. "So, the name will read ‘Bull Silver H' (that is the short and long name - bullish on silver by Handelsbanken). This was the only way we wanted to present the note. We had looked at brokerage firms online and saw that they presented them like this. We changed the name standard and for clarification we use the English words for bull and bear not the translation."

Since launching the certificates, Commerzbank has entered the market doing the same thing. "They use the same picture of a bull and a bear as statues on a table, they don't have the aggressive campaign like we do," says Bergman.

"Some of the most dramatic results have come from Handelsbankens ‘Are you Bull or Bear' campaign," says Per Torpare, product manager, derivatives and structured products at Nordnet in Stockholm. "Trading volumes in certificates on Swedish market are up by approximately 600% year-to-date. They have had a great impact on that figure, being the first to issue bull/bear certificates on the Nordic market. They have opened the market for others to follow."

The campaign results speak for themselves. "Using alternative methods (by including us and other semi-competitors) to get to the most trade intensive private investors in the region. They have also (in a more conventional manner) added much appreciated analysis to create interest to their products," says Torpare.

After launching the certificates in April 2009, Handelsbanken saw turnover of about Skr1,000 million (€108 million) in the summer.

 

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