we hadn’t done that sort of thing before,’ admits Turner. ‘But it showed where we had got to as a team. We were being proactive, using different channels and connecting with our customers in different ways. We could put it out socially and use social media influencers.’ In the event, the anniversary itself


You keep on pushing and pushing and you become more creative as a result


generated 657 pieces of coverage, of which just five per cent were unfavourable. And the best performing message regarded the bank’s return to normality, with 160 pieces of coverage, while 81 journalists tweeted a Ten Years On infographics created by the media team. Independent research by Populus placed RBS’s media team top among its peers for quality of engagement, while journalists also rated the bank’s leadership highly. Turner is also proud of the campaign surrounding the launch of the Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship, a government-commissioned examination, led by Alison Rose, then chief executive of commercial and private banking at NatWest, into the barriers faced by women in business and the ways in which these could be resolved. ‘In the past, the way we would probably have


approached [such an event] was a press release and a reception. We’d get some nice coverage and move onto something else. But we launched an integrated campaign that ran across the whole year. We landed the review, we got great coverage, we did events with the government. But then this kicked off a campaign with customers about different areas that hold back female entrepreneurship, for example, imposter syndrome,’ says Turner. ‘We held a series of networking events and round


table discussions where we reached out to entrepreneurs, who did not have to be our customers, in order to bring people together to talk through the issues and tackle some of the barriers. It was integrated, not just through media, but through social media, internally and with an external advertising campaign. That’s where we’ve got as a team. ‘[Two years ago] when somebody in my team said We


CorpComms | February/March 2020 33


want to do this speed dating event, I felt petrified. If somebody in my team came to me today and said We want to do this event, I’d think Great but what more can we do? You see that in the team. You keep on pushing and pushing and you become more creative as a result.’ Turner describes his colleagues as a mix of people who were there before the financial crisis, when RBS had been the biggest bank in the world,


‘who are still here because they know it is important to put things right’ and those, like himself, who ‘knew exactly what a basket case this business had been in the past and joined to put things right and make them better’, adding: ‘It’s a powerful combination of people who are very driven to do the right thing.’ But as the bank settles into life under the new (and


historic) brand NatWest Group umbrella, generating profits (£4.2 billion last year) rather than record-breaking losses - £24 billion in 2009, the largest in UK corporate history, Turner is determined that the team continues to push. ‘You must keep on laddering up to that goal, because that is when you have impact. If we don’t land a story in the newspaper, there’s a million different things we can now do to tell that story,’ he says. ‘Things have changed. I feel as a company we are rightly under more scrutiny than many others because we had a majority tax payer ownership. But a lot of companies face that scrutiny today. And all of us can relate to that 10 o’clock at night fear when you’re refreshing Twitter to see the front pages of the newspapers. There have been countless times when it has been about us. That fear will never go away.‘ CC


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