The danger of the RBS 'yes'

The latest campaign from RBS positions the bank as the 'yes' bank. It's taken a copywriter, or probably someone from the bank itself all of a moment or two to discover that 'yes' is in RBS if you say it slowly enough and stretch your phrasing, a bit like the person who'll tell you that while there's no 'I' in team, there's a 'me' if you look closely enough. It's like moment in Friends when Chandler says he can handle a situation because 'handle' is actually in his name. So far, so blinking obvious.

I'm a long-term customer of RBS, or if we're being less corporate and less group, the Royal Bank of Scotland. I am though like I imagine you and many others in that I'm a customer by default, remaining so as I don't have the time and inclination to change, although I actually want to. And apart from mis-selling us a mortgage and costing me a bit of money in a delayed business chequebook disaster, they've been ok. The chequebook story? The manager kept them in his drawer and didn't send them to me and was quickly 'moved on' - from what we now know about RBS however, he was probably still awarded a fancy bonus.

The RBS story of the last few years is ironically saying yes a little too often. Yes to bonkers strategic moves, driven by Fred Goodwin, and yes to alarming bonus-for-failure culture driven, or at least back-seat driven, by Steven Hester. I probably don't need an inappropriate analogy here but say yes too often and you'll end up with the kind of reputation you don't want at parties, let alone in the city and amongst a once-bitten group of customers. It was the TSB in 1984 that told us it was the 'bank that likes to say yes' and that's fine and dandy, or at least fine and dandy in an era where we woke up before we went-went.

The RBS billboard then is tick-box banking ad for modern times. Blue, obviously, and a bit of whacky typography for informality, a friendly 'I'm your friend' proposition (see Clydesdale Bank's tv campaign for cringey, trying too hard rhetoric) and a lazy 'yes in RBS' writing. Short banalities should be the order of the day - 'it's time to trust us' for example would give a nod to 'it sure as hell wasn't before, but we're fine now' with the image of a female bank manager ('the men made the mistakes message'). Come on RBS. There's more to RBS than yes.