An ATM by Any Other Name

It is the year 1979 in Trinidad & Tobago. Workers Bank—one of the precursor banks that eventually evolved to become the First Citizens financial group—is about to introduce the very first automated teller machine (ATM) in the country.

The bank could have called it an ATM service, of course. Those three letters, however, would have meant nothing to their customers or to anyone else in Trinidad at the time, this being a technology that was still barely into its infancy elsewhere in the world.

So they called their innovation the “Mary Anne All Day All Night Service”.

The source of the name was a war-time Trinidadian calypso made famous by the singer Roaring Lion:

“Whole day, whole night, Miss Mary Anne,

Down by the seaside, sifting sand…”

So this new machine that allowed the bank’s customers to withdraw cash or make their loan payments at their own convenience, at any time, day or night, first became known not as the ATM but as “the Mary Anne”. Workers Bank used Lion’s calypso in its radio commercials promoting the service and even had the words MARY ANNE illuminated atop their head office building!

Some lessons from what I consider to be this brilliant piece of marketing:

• Being the first to the local market gave Workers Bank the opportunity to brand ATM technology  in its own image (to “name it and claim it”).

• That branding resonated with its cultural context. It spoke to the local audience. It played on an already familiar notion. And it incorporated music, important in the Caribbean context.

• The branding was a simple idea that would immediately be understood. The link between the name and the calypso would only have to be established once; then any Trinidadian would instantly have been able to intuit the value proposition: service availability whole day, whole night...

Bonus: I learned the story of the Mary Anne in the book “On Becoming First”, a corporate history of the First Citizens group. It is one of the best and most beautifully produced business books I have ever read.

Images from "On Becoming First" by Kathy Ann Waterman (C) 2007 First Citizens Bank Ltd.