Harvest
January 08, 2019
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Adapting to the times: The importance of Brand Awareness in the financial services industry.

How do you measure the impact of your brand? Easy - through Brand Awareness!

2019 is here. It’s a new year, time for self-reflection and goal-setting as we set off to make this year better than the last. For financial services companies, it’s a great time to ‘look in the mirror’ and see what you can do in 2019 to improve your brand over the next twelve months. And in our opinion, the best place to start is with brand awareness.

What is brand awareness, and why is it important?

In 2014,   Nielsen* conducted a study of financial services brands across 26 countries, exploring the link between the brand and the performance of the firms. Overall, the study found that there was a strong relationship between brand awareness and firm performance. Key highlights from the survey:

  • Strong brands generate three times more market share than brands with moderate brand awareness*

  • Stronger brands observe higher client loyalty*

  • Stronger brands are less susceptible to competitive market forces*

However, financial services firms still have a long way to go to building out a fully fledged, adaptable brand building strategies, with a lot of firms still relying on traditional media to convey their value propositions and not adapting to the new digital age. A PWC** report illustrated a trend that fewer and fewer firms would be competing for more and more money in the coming years, highlighting a need for firms to increase their brand awareness to stay relevant.

Brand awareness is a key indicator of your brand’s market strength. It reflects the consumers’ familiarity with your particular brand of goods and services. It is mostly made up of intangibles, reflected in line items such as goodwill and can be measured through various key metrics such as website traffic. The perception of your brand is an accurate reflection of your value propositions as a firm. The interactions between your firm and consumers provide rich primary data insights on your brand, testing the validity of your product and services. For any company in any industry, the sensitivity you attach to your overall brand awareness in the market can have an enormous consequence for future growth and marketing efforts.

Traditional methods of brand building in the financial services sector vs digital methods.

For financial services firms to build a brand, they need to develop a cohesive, end-to-end marketing program, from broad items like developing (and executing) a brand strategy right through to more specific tactics like writing a blog. Traditional media was the go-to for many years, i.e. using advertising firms to post full page ads (often in conjunction with a written piece of content), direct mail fliers or cold calling. All these methods were used to convey the value proposition to audiences with brand awareness as the activity’s main KPI, used to demonstrate how effective they were at reaching a firm’s target audience.

And while traditional methods can be effective at brand development, they have some major drawbacks. They were expensive (sometimes prohibitively so, especially for smaller firms) and lacked clear, ready metrics to show a return on investment. Also, the nature of print advertising means that firms couldn’t be especially agile; they had to write copy, submit it, and wait.

Now, the digital revolution has ushered in a new norm, with a whole suite of digital media solutions to build your brand. Email automation is replacing direct mail fliers, digital display ads replacing print ads and digital websites replacing traditional brick and mortars. Even videos are now within reach thanks to social media and YouTube. The relatively low cost, adaptability, and ready KPIs have made them the new ‘go-to’ for financial firms looking to make a real impact on their brands. The real challenge when it comes to digital media is identifying the right tactics and management strategies to help build your brand and maintain it over the long haul.

You may be thinking, “That’s great, but where do I start when it comes to using digital strategies to build my brand?” Read part two of the Harvest brand awareness series as we delve into specific methods to build brand awareness.

 

Sources
*Nielsen,(2014, June, 4th), The Drivers of Brand Equity In Financial Services, https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2014/the-drivers-of-brand-equity-in-financial-services.html 

**PWC,(2017), Asset & Wealth Management Revolution: Embracing Exponential Change, https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/asset-management/asset-management-insights/assets/awm-revolution-full-report-final.pdf 

 

Authored: Ahmed Rosowsky

 

 

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