Bankinter: Differentiating by neglect

Cobwebbed content subverts bold marketing on a home page.

The Site

Bankinter, a Spanish financial institution, uses its corporate home page to establish the idea that it is ’different’, but management of the content puts a negative gloss on the message.

The home page on both the English- and Spanish-language versions of the corporate site is dominated by a large orange banner with the word ‘different/diferente’ inverted above the sentence “If you think all banks are the same, we would like to meet you”. Beneath this is a News announcement to the left and three subsidiary headlines to the right. The announcement concerns the bank’s first-half results: “Bankinter will be presenting the First Half 2007 results on Monday the 16th of July. The presentation… will be broadcasted by webcast at 12PM Madrid time”. The headlines link to stories from, respectively, April 2007, April 2007 and April 2006. The only other content on the page is the main navigation menu to the left.

The Takeaway

Bold it certainly is, both in design and intent, to focus a corporate home page so narrowly around a marketing slogan. ‘Different’, unfortunately for Bankinter, is the message sent out to the one intended. Thanks to the layout and composition of the page there is no escaping or diluting the impression given by the outdated supporting content of neglect, fine words not matched in practice and echoes of the outmoded Mediterranean ‘manaña culture’ stereotype.

Unforgivably, Bankinter has only itself to blame for being the victim of its boldness – and not all the guilt can be laid at the door of the marketing department. Material is available elsewhere on the site that could have been used to update the News announcement immediately or at any time in the ensuing three weeks: the results can be downloaded from the Financial information section, while there is a summary press release in the Press room (though only in the Spanish version). If you are going to put all your eggs in the one basket, it helps if you don’t crack them to start with.

First published on 07 August, 2007