The challenge
‍Being a small or medium-sized business can be tough in a world where large corporations run most industries. As an innovation studio that usually works with innovation in larger groups and companies, we were excited to take a deep dive into the world of SMB banking.

Aprilia Bank had a unique technology that allowed them to provide financing and credit to smaller businesses that would normally go under the radar of the larger banks. As they were growing and scaling, they wanted to build an insight-based growth strategy that could help them communicate their services and reach out to their customer base in a clear way. As many of us in Reodor have years of experience in the communication industry, we got to combine our methods for good innovation with our experience in carving out solid communication strategies.

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Our approach
‍As with everything we do in Reodor, we went into this project with an insight-based approach. In order to figure out how to communicate Aprila’s services, we first needed to get to know their customer base, and what kind of problems or challenges they had that Aprila could help them solve. To learn more about this, we did depth-interviews with businesses that had recently been in contact with Aprila – both the ones that had ended up choosing Aprila as their bank, and those that ended up going in a different direction.

Using one of our favorite methods for gathering and analyzing insight, the Four Forces method created by Bob Moesta, we asked them about the entire customer journey; from discovering they needed a new bank to becoming a customer and establishing a customer relation.

We then used this insight to create different archetypes of customers, based on what problems they had that Aprila could potentially solve. Unlike the traditional archetypes based on age, gender, and demographic, we created our archetypes based on what we were trying to figure out; what problems Aprila can help solve for whom, and how.

As a business that rarely touches on the field of SMB banking, we were able to look at the entire field with new eyes. Our lack of experience within this field allowed us to look at the entire space from a new perspective, and we were able to experience the customer journey ourselves, testing everything from the digital experience to the customer service.

‍The result
‍After an intensive phase of gathering insight and understanding the market, we presented our findings in a workshop that included almost all of Aprila Bank. We presented the archetypes with their different needs, and from this, we defined the exact problems that Aprila could help them solve, and how they could communicate this to these archetypes in the best possible way. We then worked with Aprila on developing clear ideas for communication concepts that could easily be tested before scaling up.

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