Arkadi Kuhlmann is out to save the savers and convert the spenders. As founding CEO of online bank ING Direct, Kuhlmann and his organization are among the few current financial institutions whose previous practices are still getting great results. Kuhlmann and co-author Bruce Philp, a branding consultant who has worked extensively with ING Direct, recently released the new book “The Orange Code.” Kuhlmann shares some thoughts with Smart Business on the principles of the code and how ING succeeded in making saving a hip thing to do.
ING Direct began with the phrase, ‘We are not a bank.’ What traditional banking barriers were you were able to knock down?
It started with the idea that people really didn’t like their banks very much. They basically felt they were a necessity, but they charged a lot of fees and they do it in the way that suits the bank, not the customer. For us, we wanted to do things in a different way. Think of a bank as a retailer and not as a traditional bank with a branch, a counter and a lineup. So, not having any branches but instead dealing with electronics and cutting out paper, [these are] things that should save people time and should also save them money.
What advice can you give to help leaders convince their teams that a new company is different from the norm?
Mostly, leaders sell visions to their customers and to the marketplace to create a persona for the company. But at the end of the day, it’s the thousand, 10,000 or 100,000 touchpoints in the form of employees and staff that really make the business run. They basically have to internalize and believe that the vision is good and can be executed and will create success for them (personally) as well as for the company. Most leaders take the view that, ‘If you’re working for us, you automatically accept the mission and the vision.’ That’s probably a challenge that is underestimated by most leaders.
ING Direct made savings sound cool during a spend-first era. What’s the secret to selling a difficult concept?
From a marketer’s point of view, if you’re going to take something that’s not the current fad, you have to instead sell the value underneath, which is what we’re doing. It may not appear logical on the surface, but deep down it’s true and the consumer knows it.
If you were a farmer who put a windmill up behind his house to get the benefits of wind energy, he knows that it’s going to cost him more than fossil fuels. But deep down, the farmer knows that from a value perspective, it’s a never-ending source of energy and that somehow, we can find a way to make the economics work.
Why is the phrase, ‘We will constantly learn,’ an essential part of ‘The Orange Code’?
I think it’s a bit of refinement from what a lot of good, leading businesses already do. They’re focused on innovation and continuous improvement. The new twist that we have on it is that you can’t just improve at the margins. … It’s pretty clear that if you’re going to be a company that wants to constantly improve, you have to take nothing for granted and rethink the business from beginning to end every day.
