Hsbc Marketing Audit
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Microenvironment
This section will focus on the factors within the company that effect its ability to serve its customers and follow its strategy successfully. The factors that will be looked at are: The company, suppliers, intermediaries, customers, competitors and publics.
The Company
HSBC is one of the worlds largest and most successful banks. To have an idea of its magnitude have a look at the organisational structure (appendix 1). In the UK alone it has 1700 branches, approximately 3000 ATM machines, over 42 000 cash machines and over 54 000 employees.
Understandably a company the size of this needs and has a lot of departments. Because of the amount of branches, employees and departments it is hard for them to all work together to provide customer satisfaction. However one of the main priorities for every department is customer satisfaction. Although all the departments dont work together each department is very large and have there own strategies and are divided into sections that do work together to provide customer satisfaction.
Some of the departments in HSBC are:
Insurance
Pensions
Sharedealing
Internet Banking
Automated Telephone Banking
Travel Money
Marketing
The department that this is focusing on is the marketing department. The goal of the department is to be:
“The guardian and custodian of customers interests within the bank”
(Marketing in HSBC Bank plc report page 7)
This goal shows that the main priority is customer satisfaction. The reason for this is with the growing competition including other banks, building societies, insurance companies and large retailers, customer service and satisfaction are what will get the custom.
The marketing department is the largest department and is divided into 14 separate units to deal with the wide variety of tasks involved in marketing. These units are:
Personal customer marketing
Business customer marketing
Customer information management
Customer management
Direct marketing
Advertising
Creative services
E-Marketing
Internet banking
Community banking and diversity
Internal communications
Customer experience
Business economics
Research and analysis
Most of these units are actually big enough to be classed as separate departments, however at HSBC they all come under marketing. To look in more depth of what these units are and what their role is look at appendix 2.
Suppliers
This category is not the most important for market research on a bank and it proved so because it was very challenging to find out. I searched the Internet, made a telephone call to 0207 992 5306, emailed Mary Walsh and Heather Lamont and also visited city business library and looked through reports, periodicals, books and newspapers.
A copy of the emails I received back is in the Research section Labelled 1 and 2.
The one bit of information I found was on the website www.timesonline.co.uk.
The report is in appendix 3 and it just says that HSBC are about to use software supplied by SAS who are providers of business analytics technology. The software is to try and reduce fraud on credit cards by analysing transactions and recognising unusual spending patterns.
Intermediaries
HSBC have a lot of intermediaries particularly financial. Another one they have is the media.
The media is one that would be most recognised because they have a well known slogan the worlds local bank and also a well known logo. They have adverts on television, the Internet, newspapers and billboards etc
The financial intermediaries that are shown below are the top 10 investors.
Stock Weight % Industry Sector
BP Plc 7.38 Oil & Gas Producers
BAE Systems Plc 6.93 Aerospace & Defense
HBoS Plc 6.29 Banks
Helphire Group Plc 5.85 General Financial
Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc 4.89 Banks
Johnson Matthey Plc 4.61 Chemicals
Legal & General Group Plc 4.37 Life Insurance
United Business Media Plc 4.25 Media
Daily Mail & General Trust Plc 4.15 Media
Resolution Plc 4.15 Life Insurance
Total 52.87
Customers
HSBC deals with personal, business/commercial, corporate, investment, markets and private customers. The main users are personal and business however that is not where they get most profit. The