Brand positioning is all about the beliefs that the customer holds about a brand. That customer visiting ING Group’s website, www.ING.com, these days would be disappointed to see that the

Whether clicking on the rendering of the new building, or on the picture of a female customer – which together occupy the top tier of the homepage – the English-speaking visitor will land on the all-Dutch site of the ZuiderHof, the park outside Amsterdam where lies the new building (alongside rival ABN Amro).

Besides the new head office building, the website’s most prominent features are, from top to bottom, a country selector, an advertising slogan (“ING leads the way in insurance, banking, and asset management”), a couple of navigation menus, press release headlines, and major links.

Overall, it looks rather cheap for a large established financial group that should try to connote trust and confidence in the minds of its worldwide customers and investors – trust and confidence being generally part of the brand DNA of corporations handling other people’s money.

Unfortunately, the site’s layout does not conform to the now accepted principles of usability, i.e., customer experience management. The frontpage, which gives the first impression, reminds one of last century portals. Moreover, products and services offerings are pretty much buried. The archives of webcast recordings are however a neat feature among an otherwise bureaucratic impression that this corporate website leaves.