During the development of our new experience concept for Citizens Bank we created this new space within the branch to be a place for starting comversations. It was conceived as a hybrid of living room, personal library or trophy room, and resource space. A key challenge in a bank is most people come in with a single focus, often a transactional one. Branches lack all of the emotionally engaging things that retail stores contain. Even grocery stores have the perimeter where shoppers have been found to be in a more more exploratory mind-state and so grocers place new products, promotion items, and communications in this space to grab attention. We needed a space that would arrest the customer's attention and where they could explore. This would then allow for different opportunities of conversations, ones focused on the dream business the customer always wanted to start, the trip they are saving to take, or other aspiration they have. Because for most people money is not what they want more of, it's the security, sustainability, and ability to do things they like. So, we needed to fill the space with conversation starters.
With inspiration of the trophy room, we did not actually want a deer head on the wall. In our research we found these paper faceted animal heads for sale on etsy and bought a bunch. They ended up being quite complicated to make—we left this to an new intern who proudly schooled us with their skill in folding this into an animal head—and focused on only two. The bear was the better of the two and was the right scale for the space on the wall. The faceted bear head was carefully packaged and transported to Boston where it was installed on the wall, but only after it made it's way around the space on the heads of our team and the Boyce construction crew.
If you were like us, and got caught up in how cool the facetted bear is, you may of missed—as we originally did—how the bear in a financial context is less positive, i.e. a bear market. This simple reference was missed by our design team, strategy team, and resarch teams who had spent weeks sourcing objects for the space. We were sadly informed of our oversight after we had placed the head on the wall. It was promptly removed and replaced with a detailed sailboat model to reference the shipping history of the area. This is why we value outside input, because when your too close to the work you can miss the most obvious of things.
