Putting The Brand In The Personal Zone

Like every major financial institution, Israel’s Bank Leumi has invested heavily in its online banking service. Log in to the site through its triple security layer, and customers can see in their personal zone the state of their account, their credit card totals, and their savings. But they can also see one more piece of information that other banks don’t usually supply.

In a box on the side of the screen, a message addresses the customer by name and informs them of the average mortgage payments made each month by people with “accounts like yours.” Click a small icon next to the message and the customer can see how much they paid last month for their own mortgage. They get to make an instant comparison using their own private data and confidential information only available to the bank.

It’s a piece of content that’s both highly personal and highly intuitive. When customers look at their bank accounts, they wonder not just about their own finances but also about how they’re doing financially in comparison to others. They want to know whether they’re spending more than most, saving too little and paying too much. But customers have no way to answer those questions. We can’t ask our friends about the size of their mortgages or how much they’re saving. And we’re unwilling to share that information with anyone else either. We treat financial information with the same confidentiality that we treat health information.

So when the bank both shows its customers their own data and allows them to make comparisons to accounts with “similar characteristics” it walks a narrow path between safeguarding private information and sharing it with others. In this case, because the comparative data is so general, the bank manages its personal zone content strategy very successfully.

Are You Healthier Than Most?

Health companies have an easier time. When patients log in to the personal zone of their HMO, they should now be able to see their own health records and test results. But to most people, that information is meaningless without a context. So the personal zones of HMOs also show the healthy ranges for blood pressure and platelet counts, again granting visitors the ability to compare their own confidential data with that of others.

For any brand that operates a personal zone, striking a balance between confidentiality and engaging content is challenging. The most engaging content the zone contains is always the user’s own information. Nothing will speak more loudly to the visitor than that content that’s about them personally. But that information often needs to be compared to other information the organization possesses to make sense.

One smart content strategy for a personal zone creates that context through the use of anonymized data. The data adds the context that gives the personal data meaning. And in being anonymized, it also shows the customer that their own information is being protected.

It’s not always an easy balance but it’s one way in which a content strategy is being applied effectively to website personal zones.

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