All of the banks and building societies in Australia, from the giants of Commonwealth and the Westpac to the tiny regional building societies are in a desperate battle to be popular.

Like girls at a year 11 formal, they are all dressed as well as their budgets will allow them to, lined up against the wall and waiting to be asked to dance.

In part this need for attention is because the banks didn’t pay that much attention to their deposit books (deposits, who needs ‘em we will just ship some more cash in from America or Holland or wherever the hell else people are still saving their cash) and after binging on a worldwide buffet of cheap debt suddenly found themselves having to raise cash again.

It is also because the market is shrinking. Two banks, the CBA and Westpac, control greater than 50% of the entire Australian market and there is no sign that their market share is diminishing, which is forcing the tier two banks to be increasingly aggressive in their marketing behaviour.

But there may not actually be a great deal of correlation between how much someone likes their bank and how much they do business with them.

This is both a frightening and liberating thought for bankers who are in many ways being held hostage to arcane brand mapping, net promoter scores and other mysterious customer surveys which pop out on a semi-regular basis to haunt senior managers everywhere.

It’s not that these surveys and tools aren’t important – they are; it is critical that businesses understand what people think of them – but it may be that they are measuring some of the wrong things.

Think about it this way; the regular winner of these surveys (the business which is most loved), are the small building societies – like IMB or Newcastle permanent or the smaller banks like St George.

If these surveys are to be believed, and these business are the most popular, with the most satisfied customers, surely then these business must be growing faster than everyone else?

Not only should they be growing faster but they should be able to command a premium for their services.

But that isn’t happening. What’s happening is that the big are getting bigger and ipso facto the small, at least in a market sense, are getting smaller.

The sense is that something else is at play here. At the heart of this is the idea that financial services are not only predicated on how much you like something but a series of concepts of utility which include but are not limited to; price, location, accessibility, family history and authenticity.

One of ideas that we have at our disposal at CoreData is a big pool of people who will answer questions we ask them (more than 100,000 at last count) and a team of really smart people.

We started to play with what was really behind the way that people are making decisions and in part there has been a charge towards perceived security. But there is something else at work and we think it’s the concept of authenticity – that is, how real each business is.

Authenticity at a very low level of measurement can be assessed by asking two questions – how much does this business do what it says it’s going to do and how much are they what they say they are?

We asked just over 500 people from around Australia about their bank and here is what they told us.

If we asked the same questions about likeability or recommendation then this chart would effectively be inverted; the green quadrant would be occupied entirely by small banks.

At the moment we are not completely sure what this means and why this is happening.

We think the numbers are probably rooted in a couple of big concepts and one is the idea of functional fixedness (that is, people are used to doing things this way) and that it may be in part due to the difference between extrinsic motivations (an extrinsic motivation is something like a cash reward or punishment – think carrot and stick in very loose terms) and social motivations - like how much you want to be part of something.

So in short we don’t know the answer to why this is happening but it’s pretty interesting and it’s something we are going to be investing more time and money in, because doing original research and playing with big ideas is one of the true pleasures of owning a small research company.