For our first project we have to create a commercial brand for a bank as well as a landing page and prototype for the brand.

Our first brief is to create a new brand for a modern bank, which is aimed at young people that are within the ages if 16-25. We are to consider what our brand should be like and how to change it to make it different to other banking options and how we can stand out against competitor, while also thinking of an effective way to attract our target audience.

In order to create a brand, I think research is needed first and foremost as I think its best to understand what we are designing for as well as what the audience needs.

What is a brand?

From week’s 1 class, I have learned that a brand is a company’s distinct identity and how they choose to create an image and personality of themselves in order to appeal and communicate to a certain audience. We learned about how creating an emotional connection with the audience can cause the customer to show loyalty to the brand.

Traditional Banks

To understand the difference between a modern digital bank, which is what we are creating, and a traditional bank, I thought that it would be best to see first-hand how the banks operated. During our first weeks lecture, I circled to a variety of different banks and observed them by seeing what people were doing at the bank and why they would be needing to go to a physical branch instead of using online services to do so.

Out of the banks that I saw, I chose three and compared them by looking at the branches in town, the reviews they had online and then compared the landing page of their website, which can be seen below.

Something that was very noticeable inside the branches of each banks was that there were very few to no people that fit within the age range for our project, therefore we were not able to find much information about our target audience, which I think is vital that I explore and look into more as it could be very helpful. However, I first looked at the online banks to compare the difference to traditional banks.

Online Banks

From looking at all these three different online banks we can see that they all offer very different services to each other and focus primrly on different aspects. This is a very different situation to traditional banks where most would offer very similar basic services and only differated on benefits. However, on online banks we can see a bigger difference and we can observe that this is due to being targeted at completely different audiences. Revolut’s main benefit is its that it allows its cusomers to exchange money into all types currencies nad is available in 40 countries. This would likely appeal to travellers or business people who need to access money while being across the world. In comparation, Monzo would likely be more suitable to a younger audience. This is due to the options that they have which allows their customers to save, manage, and budget well; students would be very inclined to use it dies to these options. On the other hand, Starling bank offers mostly what a traditional bank would, but allows much more control on managing their banking. Therefore, I think that Starling would likely target a more mature audience than Monzo.