Background
Rabobank is among the world’s 25 largest financial institutions, in terms of Tier I capital. Rabobank has over 60,000 employees internationally, who serve about 9.5 million clients in 46 countries.

Rabobank, which started 110 years ago, is a cooperation of 151 independent local Rabobanks. Agniet Niemeijer, program manager at Rabobank, defines the relationship between Rabobank and the local banks as “1 daughter and 151 mothers”.

Interesting detail: Rabobank is one of the first banks worldwide to adopt MRM. Ten years ago they started the program and recently implemented a second generation MRM tool.

Challenge
As a market leader, Rabobanks’ aim is to protect the brand and defend market share. For Rabobank, brand consistency is the starting point for centralizing the marketing communication infrastructure.

To achieve overall brand consistency a cooperation offers its specific organizational challenges. But a decentralized cooperative bank structure offers some huge advantages too. Local entrepreneurship allows local banks to maintain an intimate relationship with their clients. And being close to the market leads to a short time to market.

Rabobank's real challenge was to combine two different efficiency directions and turn them into a ‘win-win’ situation.

Objectives
In order to achieve the group objective "brand consistency", the local objective "time to market" had to be met. The bank started to provide local banks with multiple marketing communication tools to create online advertisements, outdoor, internet banners, local email DM, newsletters, posters and even magazines.

As a proof of concept to the local banks the creation and production of the customer magazine ‘"Dichterbij’ ("Closer") was automated. With a circulation of 1.1 million copies, providing 125 national variations of the magazine (containing 46 full colour pages) the operational complexity was considerable. Now, each of the 151 local banks can decide via an online tool which cover to use, write local articles and use local images, while the corporate house style is being protected by a centrally defined layout.

Results
More and more local banks have started using the central infrastructure for their local communications. The central infrastructure helped to decrease the time to market and brand consistency. In the slip stream, Rabobank managed to save millions of euro’s, although that was not the primary goal.

Protecting the brand does not only save money. Research revealed that companies that take the brand as a starting point for their internal and external communication (brand-oriented companies) have almost twice the operating profit (EBITA) as those who are not brand-oriented.