The Story

I went to Caprial’s Bistro for dinner recently - a well known Portland restaurant - and had a very interesting experience when ordering wine. There was no wine list…instead, the entire back wall of the restaurant was covered in shelves with bottles of wine. When you are ready to order your wine, you get up from your table, walk to the wall and peruse the shelves to pick your pleasure. Each bottle is labeled with a price tag, so you know what you’re getting into before they pop the cork.

What a unique and experiential way to choose a bottle of wine. If you’re at all like me, I choose my wine more for the label and the price tag than any oenophilic reasons, so not only did this serve my need to see a bottle in order to choose it, but it also forced me to get out of my seat and walk through the restaurant, seeing what yummy dishes other diners were enjoying as I went. My dining experience was about more than just taste and smell. Unlike most dining experiences, it was also about touch and sight as I picked up and looked at the different wine options.

Now I know banks and credit unions can’t have their HELOC’s on a shelf at the back of their branches, but bank marketers and credit union marketers can learn something from this restaurant’s use of a multi-sensory experience - especially the use of senses not traditionally associated with dining out in a restaurant - not to mention their creation of an experience that had more to do with choosing the wine than it did with the actual taste of the wine. Just look at Denmark’s Jyske Bank, which has actually succeeded in creating enticing product boxes for the otherwise intangible financial services that the bank sells. Again, it doesn’t always have to be about having the lowest rates or the best checking features; if you create an experience through your bank marketing or credit union marketing efforts, that’s sometimes all you need to earn and keep a customer.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 at 4:08 pm and is filed under Bank Marketing, Touch points, Experiential Marketing, Branding, Credit Union Marketing, Experiential Brands, Multisensory Marketing and 5 Senses Branding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.