Intercontinental Bank Brand Audit

Intercontinental Bank Plc began operations in 1989 as a merchant bank, up until its conversion to commercial banking in July 1999. As a merchant bank, it strategically built up its asset base by offering savings products devised as investment opportunities.

These products were very successful in the marketplace. However, in the organisation’s marketing, more emphasis was placed on the products rather than the mother brand.

The fallout of this was that the Bank was defined more in terms of its products, a very dangerous situation as the products were increasingly commoditised by competitors. Moreover, the core marketing message of the Bank was lost amid product marketing.

Alder was asked to develop a branding programme that would help mine & maximise the value inherent in the Intercontinental Bank brand.

A major aspect of the branding programme was a Brand Audit designed to obtain detailed feedback from the Bank’s audiences and intelligence to fuel branding initiatives. The Audit included the harvesting of opinions of bank customers and employees as well as the press and financial analysts. Performance benchmarks were also developed to rate the performance of individual branches in preparation for Brand CertificationTM. (Certification of individual branches of the bank based on specified brand parameters).

During the Brand Audit, major systemic problems & pertinent human resource issues were identified, in addition to the bank’s definition problems.

Recommendations were made to tackle these issues and an implementation strategy, christened the i-initiative was developed.

The result of the research exercise has since been applied to revamp the Bank’s marketing communication.


About Intercontinental Bank
Intercontinental Bank Plc was founded in March 1989 as Nigerian Intercontinental Merchant Bank Plc, a wholesale bank. Intercontinental has since grown to become one of the largest and most diversified financial services groups in Nigeria.