Hsbc Marketing Audit

Microenvironment

This section will focus on the factors within the company that effect its ability to serve its customers and follow its strategy successfully. The factors that will be looked at are: The company, suppliers, intermediaries, customers, competitors and publics.

The Company

HSBC is one of the world's largest and most successful banks. To have an idea of its magnitude have a look at the organisational structure (appendix 1). In the UK alone it has 1700 branches, approximately 3000 ATM machines, over 42 000 cash machines and over 54 000 employees.

Understandably a company the size of this needs and has a lot of departments. Because of the amount of branches, employees and departments it is hard for them to all work together to provide customer satisfaction. However one of the main priorities for every department is customer satisfaction. Although all the departments don't work together each department is very large and have there own strategies and are divided into sections that do work together to provide customer satisfaction.

Some of the departments in HSBC are:

* Insurance

* Pensions

* Sharedealing

* Internet Banking

* Automated Telephone Banking

* Travel Money

* Marketing

The department that this is focusing on is the marketing department. The goal of the department is to be:

"The guardian and custodian of customers' interests within the bank"

(Marketing in HSBC Bank plc report page 7)

This goal shows that the main priority is customer satisfaction. The reason for this is with the growing competition including other banks, building societies, insurance companies and large retailers, customer service and satisfaction are what will get the custom.

The marketing department is the largest department and is divided into 14 separate units to deal with the wide variety of tasks involved in marketing. These units are:

* Personal customer marketing

* Business customer marketing

* Customer information management

* Customer management

* Direct marketing

* Advertising

* Creative services

* E-Marketing

* Internet banking

* Community banking and diversity

* Internal communications

* Customer experience

* Business economics

* Research and analysis

Most of these units are actually big enough to be classed as separate departments, however at HSBC they all come under marketing. To look in more depth of what these units are and what their role is look at appendix 2.

Suppliers

This category is not the most important for market research on a bank and it proved so because it was very challenging to find out. I searched the Internet, made a telephone call to 0207 992 5306, emailed Mary Walsh and Heather Lamont and also visited city business library and looked through reports, periodicals, books and newspapers.

A copy of the emails I received back is in the Research section Labelled 1 and 2.

The one bit of information I found was on the website www.timesonline.co.uk.

The report is in appendix 3 and it just says that HSBC are about to use software supplied by SAS who are providers of business analytics technology. The software is to try and reduce fraud on credit cards by analysing transactions and recognising unusual spending patterns.

Intermediaries

HSBC have a lot of intermediaries particularly financial. Another one they have is the media.

The media is one that would be most recognised because they have a well known slogan 'the worlds local bank' and also a well known logo. They have adverts on television, the Internet, newspapers and billboards etc...

The financial intermediaries that are shown below are the top 10 investors.

Stock Weight % Industry Sector

BP Plc 7.38 Oil & Gas Producers

BAE Systems Plc 6.93 Aerospace & Defense

HBoS Plc 6.29 Banks

Helphire Group Plc 5.85 General Financial

Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc 4.89 Banks

Johnson Matthey Plc 4.61 Chemicals

Legal & General Group Plc 4.37 Life Insurance

United Business Media Plc 4.25 Media

Daily Mail & General Trust Plc 4.15 Media

Resolution Plc 4.15 Life Insurance

Total 52.87

Customers

HSBC deals with personal, business/commercial, corporate, investment, markets and private customers. The main users are personal and business however that is not where they get most profit. The