FNB is one of the four biggest banks in South Africa, and in 2023 it was named the strongest banking brand in the world by Brand Finance. Which is a strong position to defend – and a difficult one to grow from. Every corporate client, every municipality, every university already knows who FNB is. Awareness is not the problem. Preference is.
FNB Business came to the table with a specific ask: reposition the offering to the public sector – healthcare, higher education, municipalities, national departments – and give people a reason to switch. Not another brand refresh. A switching campaign, dressed in FNB’s brand, aimed at a sector that had been under-served by generic business-banking creative for years.
Challenge
Public sector procurement runs on trust more than on interest rates. The people who make the banking decisions for a provincial health department or a metro municipality are not persuaded by a promotional line on a billboard. They need to see that the bank understands their sector – its reporting requirements, its cash-flow patterns, its accountability pressures.
But the campaign also had to work in the wild. It had to be readable at speed on OOH. It had to earn a thumb-stop in a paid Instagram feed. It had to sit alongside FNB’s existing consumer creative without looking like a different brand.
Three constraints that usually pull in opposite directions – specialist credibility, campaign-level reach, brand consistency.
The work
We shipped the campaign across three channels, each briefed for its context – not retrofitted from a hero asset.
Out-of-home – large-format billboards for high-frequency commuter routes. Single-line headline, single CTA button (Switch to FNB Public Sector), sector recognition seal. Read time under two seconds by design.
Instagram carousels – four-frame stories that build the argument across swipes: identify a public-sector pain, name the FNB Business solution, land on the sector CTA. Vertical-first, mute-resilient, brand-locked opening frame so the first slide reads even without a swipe.
Static social feed – 1:1 posts adapted from the OOH key visuals, sequenced across sectors (public sector, higher education, healthcare) with rotating headlines. Same frame device, same portrait treatment, adjusted copy and CTA per sector.
The whole system was built so FNB Business could extend it across sub-sectors – manufacturing, retail, professional services – without a new creative round. Same frame, same tone, swap the subject and the sector line. That’s what a positioning campaign is supposed to do: give the client a system, not a set of one-off deliverables.
In collaboration with Sensesix
This campaign was made in partnership with Sensesix, the brand and advertising agency who lead the FNB Business account. Sensesix owned the strategic brief and the client relationship. Creature of Habit was the creative partner across concept, art direction, key visual development, and rollout across OOH, Instagram, and paid social.
It is the way we prefer to collaborate on large-brand work – a lean creative team plugged into a strategic partner who already knows the client’s business inside out. Faster than a full agency pitch cycle, sharper than a freelance handoff.
If your business banks with a partner who treats you like every other client on their book, that is not the deal. Talk to us about repositioning the offering, or the way you go to market with it.
