Foreigners Marketing to Foreigners

A treasured friend of mine, Dean Clealand, was just promoted from CEO, ANZ Bank Cambodia to CEO, ANZ Bank Asia. Sadly for me, Dean relocates to Singapore to take on this great promotion.

ANZ stands for Australian New Zealand Bank and has taken Cambodia by storm. Cambodians over 45 years-old don't trust banks. Older folks literally bury their savings in the form of cash, gold or precious stones. Young folks (nearly 50% of Cambodians are under the age of 25) were not around in the mid-seventies when money was abolished and people of wealth and intellect were executed. At that time, 1975, Cambodia had a population of roughly 7 million souls. By 1979 between 1.5m and 2.0m were killed or starved by a lunatic leader, hell bent on a radical variant of Maoism.

Cambodia has been a cash based society ever since, for the last 32 years. US Dollars, thank you very much. Only now is the notion of "checks" being awkwardly accepted as payment. Up until ANZ came upon the scene, credit cards were nearly unthinkable, save the five-star hotels.

ANZ has gotten millions of folks banking here for the first time. Credit cards here are tricky.There is no credit rating facility here. No TRW or Trans Union. Makes sense. It has been a cash economy.

ANZ has done a good job with comfortably introducing the ATM. No big deal to you--revolutionary here.

Now for the fun part of the story. ANZ Bank has the major cities covered in Cambodia, they are expanding into the Provence's. Get this--because the rural banks are air-conditioned locals feel that they should not enter. Air-conditioning is for rich people. And why do rich people like it cold anyway?
The story gets better. Taking-off ones shoes entering a building is polite in the Provence's and often customary in cities. ANZ found new Provence customers kicking-off their shoes at the door of their new banks making a mess and incompatible with their image. ANZ is dealing with this fact and interestingly hit problems they never saw coming.
Telling customers that it is OK to wear their shoes in the bank is apparently a bit unsettling. Only dirty places do you wear your shoes here. On top of that, villagers extrapolated, that customers now needed to wear shoes to be customers. These are problems that are so much fun to think on. One of my favorite quotes from Albert Einstein is: "Brilliant people solve problems, genius' avoid them". What a virtue.

For more information on ANZ, see www.anzroyal.com