Retail Banks Need Advocates, Bad...Unless your ING Direct

This year, we did digging on advocacy levels within specific industries. We studied apparel retailers, mobile service providers, personal care products, personal computers, airlines and retail banks. More importantly, we studied the relationships brands in these categories have with their customers. Our goal is to provide some advice, based in quantitative research, to help these brands increase the number of advocates in their customer base. The advice is rooted in behaviors that help brands earn advocacy.
 

Our first paper on this research is about six retail banks: Bank of America, Citibank, Wachovia, Washington Mutual, Umpqua and ING Direct. For each brand, we spoke with over 200 customers. It shows that there is a high correlation between financial growth and advocacy rates, and that retail bank brands have the lowest advocacy rates (and highest critic rates) of any category we've studied (rivaled only by mobile service providers). Fortunately, there is one standout in the category: ING Direct. The paper takes a close look at why ING Direct has such solid customer relationships and advocacy rates while the rest of the category suffers from lots of negative word-of-mouth and customers who feel trapped.