Last weekend I went to London to meet with some friends who are staying in Cambridge. It was an amazing trip; I loved the city, the nightlife and the fact of it being a city with so much cultural diversity. I had a crazy weekend with my friends, but on Monday it was time to come back to Edinburgh by plane.

When I arrived to the Scottish capital airport an advertisement caught my attention: 

When looking at this advert you can infer that the bank is targeting a "very proud of being Scottish" group of customers. In fact the slogan "This Is Home" and the sub-heading "Part of Scotland since 1727" makes me think of a welcoming country on which there is a very strong nationalistic feeling amongst its inhabitants. In fact I have noticed that Scottish people are very proud of being born in this country. When you ask them where they are from they will never answer you back: "I'm from Britain", it will always be "I'm Scottish". Therefore the RBS is taking the Scottish pride into play in order to communicate with people and in order to have a clear differentiation from other UK and international brands.

I personally know that Scottish banks (The RBS and the Bank of Scotland) are very strict when you are a foreigner and you try to open a bank account in their bank. In fact they asked me to bring a lot of documents and certificates which were very complicate to get! As a consequence of this I preferred to open my bank account in Santander, an American Bank, which only asked me to bring my passport and my student card. So I guess the policies of Scottish banks favor Scottish people above foreigners.

I think that in France it would be unusual for a company to decide to market their brand by employing a nationalistic approach. This fact could maybe be explained by the bad connotations nationalism usually has amongst its inhabitants. Even if opening a bank account in France is not that easy, I do not think they favor locals above foreigners. In fact I think French banks try to be the more consistent regarding their policies as possible.