A building society is a financial institution owned by its members as a mutual organisation. They offer financial services, with a traditional focus on savings and mortgage lending. They exist in the UK, Australia and Ireland, amongst other Commonwealth countries.

They bear some resemblance to credit unions in terms of organisation, however, rather than promoting thrift and offering unsecured business loans, their purpose was originally to channel saving members' deposits into home mortgages for borrowing members. Alongside these products, they can now also offer current accounts, credit cards, loans and insurance to their members.

Nationwide is the world’s largest building society.

The Current Account Switch Service (CASS) is an independent, not for profit organisation which facilitates current account switching.

N.B. When we refer to ‘net gains’ this is the number of accounts switched to Nationwide minus the accounts switched out of Nationwide.

We needed to find ways of making Nationwide’s difference clear. Since the category is dominated by big banks talking down to consumers, we got real people who don’t live in a bubble but had honed their ability to put their life into words as spoken word poets, to reflect on their own lives using their own voices.

We filmed them in their own clothes, in their own homes, and let them speak for themselves about broad themes, like home, friendship, family or loyalty. While the stories were personal, they were universally relevant. All we did was add titles.

The category is dominated by high production budgets, so we went the other way with a raw, stripped back approach that focussed on authenticity and allowed us to be more prolific. The less the hand of the agency was visible in the finished piece, the more powerful we felt each would be.

With apathy and inertia rife, we needed to find something about the building society difference that people could care about and stop Nationwide being lumped together with the banks.

The answer turned out to have less to do with the current accounts themselves, and more with the type of business people wanted to ‘bank’ with. Incredibly, more than half of the UK didn’t trust banks to work in their best interests. But how could we show Nationwide was different?

Working with Nationwide’s own archivist, we delved into the history of the brand, uncovering its defining myth - it was founded by everyday people coming together to accomplish something they couldn’t do alone. Its founding purpose was a social purpose rather than a commercial one. Nationwide is a building society; it exists to build society.

And, by it, we mean Nationwide’s members. Unlike banks, there is no us and them, a building society is inseparable from its membership. It is of the people, by the people, for the people.

We realised that to make this stick, we needed to create advertising that stands apart through its unwavering commitment to representing the real lives of everyday people, authentically.

Since launch, Nationwide has seen significant improvements in brand image attributes such as “different from other financial service providers”, “cares more about meeting people’s needs than maximising profit” and “ a brand you can trust”. There have also been significant improvements in brand consideration generally and current account consideration in particular. Without any changes to the products themselves, more people would now consider Nationwide for their current account.

And they aren’t just considering, they are switching too. Nationwide tripled its share of switchers: net switcher share went from 16% to 56%. Nationwide gained more net switchers than all the banks combined! Put another way, Nationwide gained 4 accounts for every 1 lost, the next best only managed 1.3 gains for every 1 lost. Nationwide has been so successful at growing its membership that we had to change our endline: “14 million members building society, nationwide” became 15 million.