ING Diba AG Case Study

Although ING-Group and particularly its German subsidiary ING-DiBa AG (“DiBa”), the retail (and direct) bank of ING-Group, have been pioneers in terms of effective usage of digital marketing, the knowledge and the efforts of its sister company “ING Bank”, the German commercial bank (my employer), are still in its infancy. With ING Bank’s initial focus on multinational corporates, they didn’t see the need to put a lot of efforts on marketing activities in the commercial banking area, least of all to put particular emphasis on digital media. After the financial crises this worked well for a while as commercial banks could sell their services mainly through providing enough balance sheet commitment, i.e. providing corporate loans to clients. Nowadays, where liquidity is much easier to get on the capital markets and where particularly German banks have tons of liquidity, this criteria becomes less important as lending becomes more a commodity type product. Thus, competition increases, margins are shrinking continuously and it becomes much

In those cases it becomes extremely important to stay on top of those discussions. ING-DiBa AG did very well with the “sausage scandal” in Germany where DiBa published an ad with a German basketball pro (Dirk Nowitzki), who was happily eating a piece of sausage in a DiBa commercial. As a result militant vegans and vegetarians used this as a platform to start huge negative propaganda on Facebook against meat eaters and against DiBa, obviously supporting the meat consumption. As DiBa dealt with this very professional and successfully, it is often used in the press as an example for a perfect reaction on bad social media. Thus, ING Wholesale Germany benefits from having the knowledge already within the Group. If needed, it should be fairly easy to build upon this and use this for the wholesale banking