Friendship means trust, courage, solidarity and empathy. We need it in Romania. We need to talk more about the connections that underpin communities and make them stronger. And this happened in Sibiu, this year, at FITS. Traditional partners of the Sibiu International Theater Festival for 21 years, UniCredit Bank embraced the theme of 2024 through a novel initiative. Under the sign of #Friendship, UniCredit Bank thanked all the other partner banks and started a conversation through OOH messages in Sibiu and on social media. The reactions from the other banks came immediately, showing that friendship is also possible in business, between competitors, and art can open a common space for dialogue.
Anca UngureanuDirector of Identity and Communication UniCredit Bank, believes that the Romanian market has reached the necessary maturity for friendship campaigns between competitors and such moments of recognition of the results and work of companies in the same industry.
“There are more and more brands that have entered a collaborative stage where they understand that an open, empathetic, humane public behavior is the only way they can attract the attention of consumers in a crowded market of messages devoid of most of the time any substance”, says Anca.
The response of the banks and their participation in the dialogue showed that the communication market in Romania has evolved a lot and reached a stage where such collective campaigns are possible. Laura Mihăilă, Director of Marketing, Communication & CX, Raiffeisen Bank Romania, says that the economy can only develop by supporting communities.
“We are glad that other colleagues in the industry see things the same way as us and we all put our shoulders to the support of the Sibiu festival, which has already become a national brand.
If you want to get somewhere fast, go alone. If you want to go far, it’s better to go with those with whom you share common values. It was a campaign that relied on the power of fair play and friendship, in line with our Raiffeisen Bank values of highlighting #totceeaceneunește with the people, businesses or communities with which we grow”, says Laura .
The messages of friendship appeared in 83 places in Sibiu and Selimbar, strategically located according to the bank branches. Cătălina Roman, Identity & Strategic Communication Director CEC Bank, believes that collective efforts to support culture and community are an important part in the evolution of any company.
“We happily responded to UniCredit Bank’s proposal to CEC Bank and all the other banks present at the Festival, to unite our thoughts and emotions in one common goal: to make people happy. We have learned together, since 2020, that at the end of the day , the most important thing is to build together for the good of the community. And that’s exactly what FITS has been doing for years: it brings us together, makes our souls happy and makes friends where some wouldn’t even expect it,” says Cătălina.
Anca Ungureanu has over 21 years of experience in marketing and communication, graduated from the EMBA program at the Berlin School of Creative Leadership, is an Aspen Young Leader (2013) and a Certified Practitioner in Sustainability of the Institute for Environmental Management and Evaluation (IEMA).
Next, we talk with Anca about art and friendship, solidarity in the communication and banking industry, how this year’s campaign in Sibiu was conceived and why it is important that this brave dialogue, started at FITS, goes on .
UniCredit & art
For almost two decades, UniCredit Bank has been actively supporting culture and performance in the arts, and for over ten years it has focused its attention on the creative industries. Our objective is to contribute to the growth of the communities in which we operate as a business and to reach their maximum potential, with a special focus on supporting education and creative entrepreneurship.
Romanian Design Week and Romanian Creative Week are our already traditional partners, with whom we outline consistent efforts in support of these creative communities year after year. This year we turned our attention to young graphic designers, whom we awarded at RDW 2024, and on the occasion of this year’s edition of RCW we developed real marathons of financial and entrepreneurial education for early stage creatives who want to develop their own business, in collaboration with the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University in Iași.
We recently returned from Sibiu, a road we know, love and have been doing for 21 years – as traditional partners of the Sibiu International Theater Festival.
UniCredit & FITS friendship
UniCredit and FITS have been partners and friends for 21 years. This rapprochement started naturally, UniCredit Bank having a passion for art and culture coded in its DNA. From the very beginning, through this partnership we have tried to provide people who come to the festival with unique experiences and useful tools to make their participation in the festival more pleasant and easier.
We started by setting up the Culture Factory, now called the UniCredit Culture Factory, a space that hosts, among other important performances from the festival, the incomparable Faust directed by Silviu Purcărete. Then we developed the FITS mobile app which provides edition after edition all the information you need if you come to the festival. For those who prefer the smell of printed paper and the analog experience, we publish the Festival Program every year, and from 2024 we also support the volunteer program through which hundreds of people of all ages help the smooth running of FITS.
Unicredit’s message at FITS 2024
Every year the communication campaign for FITS is a special one for UniCredit Bank. It’s one of those campaigns we can’t wait to make happen and really care about, and throughout the editions we’ve had memorable ideas and execution every time. This year the theme of the festival “Friendship” gave us the idea to make a campaign different from all the others. Something very simple, but which is more than a promotional campaign for UniCredit Bank: it is a reverence for normality.
A little background to better understand this normality I’m talking about. UniCredit Bank is not the only bank supporting this festival. And it couldn’t be. Moreover, probably, no bank would be able to sponsor this festival on its own, the organization of which requires ample financial, human and organizational resources and above all different perspectives.
Together with us, year after year, 5 other banks join FITS driven by the same passion for art, culture and theater as we do. FITS is also the only festival, the only project that managed to gather around it so many players from the same industry, the banking industry, an industry that is otherwise extremely competitive.
In this context, this year, taking advantage of the theme of the festival, it seemed absolutely natural to us to welcome the FITS partner banks and this collective effort without which the festival could not look the same. Because at the end of the day, this is what normal should look like: to be able to stand next to each other and be happy that together we can do more than we could each do separately.
Concretely, the executions of the campaign took the form of friendship messages, personalized for each partner bank. All 5 banks, without exception, responded to our messages with a lot of warmth and solidarity of the guild and developed similar messages on their social media accounts that colored the virtual space, perhaps for the first time in Romania in such a campaign, with such a pretext. It turned out to be a full-fledged “friendship cake” that we all enjoyed equally.
The idea of the campaign
I can’t say that I left from a need, but rather from a desire. The desire to normalize the recognition of the merits of your business competitors, of their contribution to the development of the community in which we all operate, and especially the desire to normalize collaboration for the same cause.
Probably a few years ago this campaign would not have been possible. Fortunately, today I believe that the banking communication market in Romania has reached the necessary maturity for such moments of recognition of the results and work of companies in the same industry, of direct business competitors, to be possible.
This is also because in recent years, both in Romania and internationally, some of the brands have started to train their empathy muscle more, engaging in more direct communications, through more courageous dialogues, speaking more “like people” and not as a corporation. There are more and more brands that have entered a collaborative stage where they understand that an open, empathetic, humane public behavior is the only way they can attract the attention of consumers in a crowded market with messages lacking those more times than any substance.
You know that kind of idea that comes instantly? So was this idea. As soon as we found out the theme of the festival, we knew what we wanted to do. But even if it came immediately, I can’t say it came out of nowhere. Because for over 15 years I have been saying and saying and still saying in my public interventions at the various conferences where I am invited, that I appreciate the collaboration and that I would like more competitors to recognize each other’s merits and put their shoulders to common causes .
And more than ever I am convinced that a strong brand should not be afraid of diluting its impact in communication if it supports the same project together with one or more direct competitors. On the contrary. The better a project is supported, the more likely it is to have a really big impact. And the better, more memorable, with a large footprint a project turns out, the greater the chances that all sponsors and partners will collect more important positive image capital.
This year the context and theme of the festival helped us to demonstrate the benefits of this theory of collaboration that we have been advocating for a long time. And we did this by publicly showing our appreciation and solidarity towards colleagues from other banks who, in turn, contribute to the development of key cultural events in Romania. This was the way from the idea to the deed.
SIDE
I could say that our expectations were exceeded 🙂 First of all, all the partner banks responded to us. But we already expected that. Many of them didn’t just do it with a simple post on their social media accounts, but developed another mini-mirror campaign in which they, in turn, thanked the other players.
In addition to this visible evidence from the online environment, we received countless individual congratulations to UniCredit Bank’s marketing team in real-time & real-life, both from the simple participants of the festival in Sibiu, as well as from professionals in the field of marketing- those who shared the campaign and wrote on their pages that they hope it will be only the first campaign of this kind in Romania. We are very proud that our idea went viral so much and generated applause on a very large scale.
Solidarity in the communication industry
As I said earlier, I think that the entire communication market in Romania has evolved a lot in recent years and continues to do so. The multi-directionality of the messages that now form a brand has brought increased attention to its behavior in relation to its stakeholders.
Communication can no longer be controlled 100% by brands, and this translates into a greater consolidation of communication at the level of all business segments, which must act in unison, but also in a relaxation that was missing before. That on the one hand. On the other hand, I believe that consistent and coherent communication efforts over the years give results and brands can be more relaxed because they have built reputation and stability in the eyes of consumers vis-à-vis the values that underlie the construct . And this is where the next level comes in, this leap to openly expressed solidarity, thanks to the competitor or, in our case, an invitation to be friends, further.
Source: www.iqads.ro
