The essential difference
Going back for the future
Working tools
Finding the right mood
Off the peg
new look, old values
These are the building blocks you work with to find a
means to meet that desire.'
But before they could get down to work, Newell
and Sorrell had to define this fundamental idea, and it
had to be real, not cosmetic. 'We had to find out what
distinguished Rabobank from all other banks,' Newell
recalls. 'At first, this seemed like an extremely difficult
task because, at the end of the day, a bank is a bank is
a bank. What we needed was something that made this
one essentially different.'
They found it in the bank's cooperative history.
'Once we had been commissioned to do the work, the
first thing was to get into the bank and
basically live there,' says
Newell. Then we could
start our own extensive
research throughout the
organization and in the
Netherlands itself.
That's what we did
for two months and
at the end of that
time, we really did
feel there was something fundamentally different about
this bank. The cooperative goal is an idea you can truly
believe in. It means this bank is not merely concerned
with pleasing shareholders. It takes the time to build up
a real relationship with the community it serves and the
people in it. Too many companies today talk about cus-
tomer-first programs, but a lot of it is no more than lip-
service and superficiality. In contrast, when you think
about the origins of this bank in small communities, it
really does have a strong foundation for this idea - it's
not just a slogan they've plucked out of thin air.'
Newell and Sorrell now had something to work
with. 'This was a very exciting time for us,' says John
Sorrell, 'because we feit this very strong sense of team
work within the organization that existed in spite of its
seemingly highly fragmented structure. And the team
work element was not only among staff, but also with
the communities the bank serves. We began to realize
that a bank could not have this type of relationship
with its own people and its customers if it wasn't pre-
pared to spend time with them.'
Time would go on to play an extremely important
role in the concept Newell and Sorrell ultimately
developed for the bank. But pushing a single idea is
not the design company's way. 'When we were hired,'
Sorrell recalls, 'we had nothing on paper because we
are not in the business of shaking ideas out of our slee-
ves.' Newell picks up the story. 'What we try to show
a cliënt is what we call "what if" scenarios, which is a
way of holding up a mirror to a company. By doing
this, you bring out all kinds of other aspects that have
to be incorporated into the ultimate concept. So we
did some designs that were not intended as serious
proposals, but made the bank look more flamboyant,
or more formal than it really
wanted to be. But this is a way of
finding the right mood. Both par-
ties learned a lot from this pro-
cess. It has to be a cooperative
thing, and it was also a lot of
fun. Essentially, it comes down
to us helping the bank decide
what it wants.'
Close cooperation had led to the
definition of a number of key
elements that together would
express the bank's essential identity. These included
honesty, integrity, warmth, openness, client-orientation
and numerous others. 'Among our original proposals,
there were two that we feit were fairly serious conten-
ders,' says Jones. 'One was a flower symbol. It cer-
tainly satisfied some of our criteria - it was friendly,
beautiful, open, honest, very Dutch. But we also said: if
we're honest and we run through our checklist, it is
lacking literal humanity.' The other proposal was an
extremely graphic and abstract image of a stylized
clock topped by a peg-like figure. 'The problem with
abstract images is that it takes a lot of time before
the organization's reputation attachés to them,'
Jones believes. 'Just think of the Mercedes sym
bol. When they first developed it, it was no
more than a nice idea. It wasn't until de
cades later that it had become synony-
mous with top quality cars. So we didn't
believe an abstract symbol was right
for the bank because they seemed to
be in a bit of a hurry. They wanted to
begin this communication program very
Raboband International 3
