Branding a bank is not only trying to break out of an ocean of sameness, it’s also trying to create change in a business that’s not directly prone to change. Also, to be frank, online payments is not a high interest category. So when Klarna comes along, it’s about disrupting one of the biggest industries in the world. Why can’t a bank be up there, brand-wise, with the biggest and most famous brands in Silicon Valley, London or Paris? How do you rebrand/relaunch a payment provider/bank, in a way that makes people want to engage with it?

Klarna’s USP, the “Pay after delivery”-payment option was not the primary driver on the payment market. It wasn’t the second. Nor the third. Out of 33 possible volume drivers, Pay after delivery came in last. The first spot was commanded by a strongly emotional driver: status. The brief therefore was very simple. In order to make Klarna more commercially successful – make Klarna a high status brand. The strategic vehicle was derived from that: to make Klarna high status, go for fame. So we changed. We went where high tech meets high fashion. Where ones and zeros meets hearts and guts. Where “what is it?” meets “I like it!” We shifted from being a just another rational payment provider into being an emotional shopping experience. Smoooth was born.

Smoooth is more than an ad concept for a bank. It’s an idea that portrays what Klarna is, aims to be and the feeling you get using Klarna’s services. It’s a fully integrated concept that influences everything from outdoor ads and commercials to the smallest icon in the app, the store checkout, newsletters and invoices. It guides how the CEO does PR, how customer service replies to your questions, how the HQ offices looks like, communication visuals, tone of voice and names of products… It’s an idea that moves the Klarna brand to the opposite end of how other banks and financial services corporations usually behave and act.

The 2016 campaign had an earned reach of 9.7 million views, and while the market for payments is growing, other big actors are decreasing in numbers in terms of brand when Klarna is increasing.