Bet on Boring

Getting results doesn't have to be complicated or exciting. Sometimes boring is good.

Check out this unconventional marketing by PNC Bank, the self-branded "Boring Bank". Recently "boring" has been used as positive quality when describing politicians. The idea is that in the age of social media, brands (of which political parties are a category) use sensational topics to garner attention and support. However, sensational or emotive topics are unproductive, as the argument goes, and so we should support brands, causes, and in this case, banks, which do not generate value by getting attention, but by simply fulfilling their fundamental purpose. For a bank, that would be providing financial services.

Where else has "boring" been used as a compliment? Can you think of companies that have wasted resources by straying too far from their core functions?

We should go a little further into how "boring" is used in these cases. Boredom is definitely not a good thing. Some people say that they enjoy being boring in adult life. However, they themselves are not bored—they are content—, but they describe themselves as boring because that's what they would appear like to an outside observer—a younger version of themselves. Going back to politicians, politicians should not be literally boring to each other, as they would lose their colleagues attention and not get any work done. However, the argument goes that, to outsiders, normal effective political work is boring because it is unfamiliar or outside their skill domain. And so again here we see that the argument PNC is making is that it's good when work is externally perceived as boring, because that means things are working normally, effectively.

You can see more comical ads by PNC by searching YouTube.