Branding and relationships: Customer and supplier perspectives

This paper explores and investigates the role of branding within financial services. Specifically, the study aims to assess the importance of branding and its associated elements including brand image and brand experience in the relationships that exist between consumers and their financial brands. It aims to achieve this through research, which identifies gaps between the managerial and consumer perspectives on branding in relationships in retail financial services. It is well established that the characteristics of services are different from those of manufactured goods and that service personnel play a central role in the services experience. Moreover, the concept of relationship marketing within services proclaims the importance of one-to-one relationships between businesses and customers as well as relationships between consumers and their brands. Drawing from the fields of brand management, relationship marketing and services marketing, this research aims to investigate the perceptional differences between consumers and suppliers in relation to the importance of branding in financial service relationships. The research findings indicate that brand experience appears to be far more salient than brand image in shaping and building meaningful and lasting brand perceptions and promoting customer retention.     

The magic of branding: The role of ‘pledge’, ‘turn’ and ‘prestige’ in fostering consumer trust in financial services

The purpose of this article is to study the impact of brand image on consumer trust through empirical investigation in the context of the financial services sector. While trust helps to bind consumers to brands, a strong brand image works like magic in reducing consumers’ risk perception and promoting trust. This study analyses how brand image influences consumers’ trusting intention through operationalising an interdisciplinary brand-trust model. Constructs and measures were drawn from interdisciplinary brand and trust literature and tested through employing EFA, CFA and structural equation modelling. Data were collected through a quantitative survey of 300 financial services consumers. Using the analogy of a magic trick, the study unveils the key role of financial services branding in engendering consumer trust in the ‘pledge’ or ‘prestige’ parts of the trick but not in the ‘turn’. The research contributes to the convergent and mutually inclusive theories of trust and branding as well as services marketing literature. For managers and policymakers in the financial services sector the findings will help them to effectively manage brand image and foster consumers’ trusting intention.     

Independent financial adviser (IFA)-based brand equity pyramid

This paper aims to evaluate the applicability of the existing brand equity pyramid models in the context of independent financial advisers (IFAs) in the UK financial services sector. Nine in-depth interviews with IFAs and nine in-depth corroboration interviews with senior marketing managers and employees in one of the UK’s largest financial services providers were undertaken for the purpose of the study. The findings indicate that when applied in the context of IFAs, the existing brand equity pyramid models require modification. These findings lead to the development of an IFA-based brand equity pyramid. The new model can provide insight for financial services marketing academics and practitioners on how IFAs perceive and evaluate financial services brands to be recommended to their customers. Our findings will help financial services providers to develop strong brands in the mind of IFAs.

     

A survey of key success factors in financial services marketing and brand management

What challenges and opportunities do financial services marketers face as they strive to improve marketing and brand performance, relevance, value and accountability within their organisations? To help answer this question, MCorp., a strategic brand and marketing consultancy, surveyed marketing executives from 67 financial services institutions across the USA in the autumn of 2004. The survey grouped responses into several categories, ranging from an understanding of how marketing and brand performance is tracked, to respondents' views on specific challenges to improve marketing and branding effectiveness. Across all categories, data drove two ‘big-picture’ conclusions which reveal key strategic issues facing financial services marketers today. First, there is a stated lack of brand and marketing performance information, and an absence of the systems and programmes to track it. Secondly, there is a perceived lack of top-down organisational understanding of the importance, value and meaning of brand within respondent organisations. Within the overall context of these conclusions, analysis led to a series of key findings, and drove specific recommendations for addressing the issues raised. While the illustrations given are based on data gathered from institutions in the USA, the author's experience suggests that the conclusions and attendant recommendations can serve as a basis for process and performance improvement in any financial services institution.     

Personal acquaintances and salespeople in financial services: Differences between customers and friends

The existence, benefit and management of customer–salesperson relationships in the marketing of financial services are topics of increasing interest. Much of the sales and marketing literature implies that because of time spent together, salespeople and some of their customers develop close relationships that are akin to friendships. Evidence from social psychology confirms that strong relationships are founded in deep knowledge of others gained over long periods after sharing personal information. This paper reports on the results of a study of salespeople's assessments of their personal acquaintance with customers and friends in a financial services setting. The results indicate that salespeople do not classify customers as friends on all the dimensions of personal acquaintance. Furthermore, the nature of personal acquaintance differs between ‘good’ customers (those salespeople enjoy serving), and ‘bad’ (those they do not), with the exception of the personal acquaintance dimensions of interaction frequency and personal disclosure. We discuss the implications for practice and make recommendations for future research.     

Building a Bridge between Marketing and Finance

Corporate finance executives are often frustrated by spending proposals from their marketing colleagues but cannot seem to be able to quantify the putative benefits. Similarly, the marketing staff is frustrated by the finance team's inability to convert soft marketing metrics, such as “awareness” and “customer satisfaction” into financial forecasts. The challenge is that neither marketers nor finance executives have been able to articulate a single analytical framework which both explains how and why brands come to flourish or flounder and how brand growth contributes to the business's short and long term bottom line. Lacking an effective way to do this now, most managers default to using the hard data they do have, namely how marketing investment is likely to impact sales this quarter and next. This reinforces the widespread focus on quarterly EPS and reduces the perceived value of the marketing department to their ability to hit three month sales targets. This degraded view of marketing's contribution and the inability to link “soft” marketing metrics to longer term financial returns impedes building long‐term brand value. This article focuses on how advances in behavioral science and financial analytics offer an effective way to bridge this gap between marketing and finance. Building that bridge requires better measures of brand health and financial performance to allocate capital and marketing resources. Undoubtedly, brand building is both an art and a science. But, the finance people can develop an evidence‐based framework explaining how some of the “softer” investments such as brand building, contribute to the value of the firm.     

Brand portfolio options for the UK retail banks

Following deregulation in the late 1980s, many financial service companies rapidly grew their product portfolios. Developing these extensive portfolios has raised complex issues for financial service companies regarding how the new products and services should be marketed and, in particular, how they should be branded. This paper seeks to identify the relevant issues concerning the marketing and branding of large portfolios of financial service products. Using the brand portfolio model developed by Aaker and Joachimsthaler,¹ the paper analyses the brand portfolio strategies adopted by the UK's leading retail banks (Barclays, Lloyds TSB, NatWest/RBS and HSBC). The paper concludes that given the complexity of branding as a concept and in predicting how consumers will respond, ultimately all financial services need to experiment more both with how individual brands are positioned and advertised and what portfolios are optimal.     

E-business opportunities in financial services

Over many years, technological developments have enabled financial services products to be sold and administered via remote distribution channels. E-business is the latest channel whose potential is being explored by both traditional financial services players and new entrants alike. But, in their haste to ‘go online’, are organisations, new and old, falling into the ‘technology trap’ and ignoring the fundamentals underpinning financial services retailing and, perhaps, undermining some of their ‘segment-of-one’ strategies? This paper concludes that the key to successful e-financial services retailing is to take the nuances, attributes, techniques and skills that have accompanied financial services products in the physical world and reinvent them in an e-environment. Only by following this approach will e-business avoid being labelled as a solution looking for a problem. UK high street banks are continuing to extend the choice of channel through which customers can manage their money, eg e-banking. But it is suggested that channels such as e-banking potentially reduce the level of personal contact between bank and customer to the extent that a ‘virtual’ relationship develops. This paper concludes that, given the tendency towards ‘virtualisation’, it is inconceivable that bank–customer relationships will become any more intimate in the future. Indeed, a greater degree of personalisation in customer communication may be the very best that banks are able to offer.     

借鉴国外成功经验制定工商银行个人金融发展战略

在现代商业银行发展中,无论是目前公认的全球最大的花旗银行还是以零售业务为主的英国劳埃德银行,其主要业务收入来源均为个人金融业务.随着我国个人收入的迅猛增长、金融意识的增强及金融资产总量的增加与结构的变化,既对我国商业银行个人金融业务提出了新的需求,也为其提供了广阔的发展空间.工商银行应在突出大行特征、全面服务优良大客户的同时,充分发挥自己具有"社区"小银行功能的优势,通过建立"大个金"的全新理念、建设个人客户系统平台、健全营销机制、加大创新力度、加大流程化管理及调整客户战略等途径,不断做大做强个人金融业务,进而确立中国最佳零售银行的地位.     

Customer-centered brand management

Most executives today agree that their efforts should be focused on growing the lifetime value of their customers. Yet few companies have come to terms with the implications of that idea for their marketing management. Oldsmobile, for example, enjoyed outstanding brand equity with many customers through the 1980s. But as the century wore further on, the people who loved the Olds got downright old. So why did General Motors spend so many years and so much money trying to reposition and refurbish the tired,tarnished brand? Why didn't GM managers instead move younger buyers along a path of less resistance, toward another of the brands in GM's stable--or even launch a wholly new brand geared to their tastes? Catering to new customers, even at the expense of the brand, would surely have been the path to profits. The reason, argue the authors, is that in large consumer-goods companies like General Motors, brands are the raison d'etre. They are the focus of decision making and the basis of accountability. But this overwhelming focus on growing brand equity is inconsistent with the goal of growing customer equity. Drawing on a wide range of current examples, the authors offer seven tactics that will put brands in the service of growing customer equity. These include replacing traditional brand managers with a new position--the customer segment manager; targeting brands to as narrow an audience as possible; developing the capability and the mind-set to hand off customers from one brand to another within the company; and changing the way brand equity is measured by basing calculations on individual, rather than average, customer data.     

The marketing cube

Today's business professional should consider three dimensions, or success drivers, when devising marketing programmes: profitability, profit potential and likelihood for retention — the ’marketing cube‘. Simply said, the margins on customers who fall into the ’right customer‘ group, as defined by this framework, are too great to ignore. Profit, widely confused with lifetime value, is a fact based on previous behaviour — and many financial service organisations are now calculating revenue minus costs for each customer to determine profit. Profit potential is an estimate of one individual customer's contribution to a company's bottom line. It emerges from a model. The modelled profit less actual is referred to as ’profit opportunity‘.Retention is the third component of the framework, and here there are ways to predict the loss of revenue from customers and implement preventive measures, before this loss even happens. A matrix of these three dimensions can help any financial service marketer build a next most logical product model and business rules that govern a successful customer relationship management (CRM) programme.     

See your brands through your customers' eyes.

Subaru markets an L.L. Bean Outback station wagon. Dell stamps Microsoft and Intel logos on its computers. Such inter-weaving of different companies' brands is now commonplace. But one of the central tools of brand management-portfolio mapping--has not kept pace with changes in the marketplace. Most conventional brand maps include only those brands owned by a company, arranged along organizational lines with little regard for how the brands influence customer perceptions. In this article, the authors present a new mapping tool--the brand portfolio molecule--that reveals the way brands appear to customers. The brand portfolio molecule includes all the brands that factor into a consumer's decision to buy, whether or not the company owns them. The first step in creating a brand portfolio molecule is to determine which brands should or should not be included. The second step is to classify each brand by asking five key questions: 1) How important is this brand to customers' purchase decisions about the brand you're mapping? 2) Is its influence positive or negative? 3) What market position does this brand occupy relative to the other brands in the portfolio? 4) How does this brand connect to the other brands in the portfolio? 5) How much control do you have over this brand? The last step is to map the molecule using a 3-D modeling program or by hand with pen and paper. Individual brands take the form of atoms, and they're clustered in ways that reflect how customers see them. The usefulness of the tool lies in its ability to show the many forces that influence a customer's buying decision--and to provide a powerful new way to think about brand strategy.     

The social media faces of major global financial service brands

With the advent of social media, brand management has become not only more difficult, but also increasingly critical to the credibility and reputation of firms. Moreover, consumer-generated content and its rapid diffusion takes control over advertising-intended messages away from brand managers. Financial services brand managers will not fully be able to control the destinies of their brands, but at the very least they need to be involved in the conversations that speak about their brand. This article suggests a powerful analytical tool Chernoff Faces, which can add to financial service brand managers’ arsenal.     

The social media faces of major global financial service brands

With the advent of social media, brand management has become not only more difficult, but also increasingly critical to the credibility and reputation of firms. Moreover, consumer-generated content and its rapid diffusion takes control over advertising-intended messages away from brand managers. Financial services brand managers will not fully be able to control the destinies of their brands, but at the very least they need to be involved in the conversations that speak about their brand. This article suggests a powerful analytical tool Chernoff Faces, which can add to financial service brand managers’ arsenal.     

‘On-brand banking’: An examination of the factors contributing to effective branding and brand development through direct marketing in the consumer financial services sector

The services sector now accounts for more than two-thirds of GNP in the UK and yet much of the work on branding is based on fast-moving consumer goods. This paper presents key factors for effective brand and brand loyalty building in financial services direct marketing and examines why these success factors may be missing from most financial services direct mail. The issues are examined here from a direct marketing (DM) agency and DM brand experts' perspective. Key objectives for successful branding in financial services direct marketing emerge. Barriers believed to be preventing the consumer financial services sector from using the direct marketing medium to its full brand-building potential are reported and recommendations are made for overcoming some of these problems.     

炙手可热的商标

成功的商标可以带来更好的客户体验、更多的收入和更高的利润。《银行家》杂志50家金融商标排名赋予了各大商标的财务价值并以此对其评级。     

Winning the worksite customer

As the UK financial services industry advances channel strategies in response to developments in regulation, technology and government policy, a number of systems are evolving. One such system is worksite distribution. The environment is set to facilitate the development of this channel and a good deal of activity is under way. Key environmental drivers include the legal obligation on UK employers regarding stakeholder pensions provision; the continuing erosion in state benefits and the recognition that individuals will almost certainly have to provide for themselves in retirement; and the culmination of IT infrastructure development. Along with a tight labour market and reduced access to financial advice for the ‘mass market’ as advisers turn their focus to high-net-worth individuals, the role of the employer and the workplace as a source of information and purchase power begins to make sense — in essence, the role of a ‘portal’. This paper takes a close look at the customer potential of worksite marketing — both employers and employees — and the technology challenge faced by providers in winning their business.Worksite distribution (also known as worksite marketing) is the latest distribution channel emerging in UK financial services. There has been much discussion over the last two years on the viability of this channel in the UK. These discussions initially focused on comparing the drivers in the UK to the different drivers behind the development of the channel in the USA. More recently, discussions have focused on UK activity and the scramble to secure (pre-register) stakeholder pension (SHP) clients. This flourish of provider activity may well account for the channel becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, with many employers already being presented with a SHP or worksite proposition. ‘Best practice’ in this channel will be dependent on providing the best process for target customers — some lessons are learned from experience in other established markets and, importantly, from realising the inherent differences between the UK and these markets. This paper takes a deeper look at the subject and explores the worksite customer — who they are, how to win their business, and the enabling technology that will determine the outcome for financial service providers embarking on this channel.     

Consideration sets for financial services brands

This study examines the extent of consumer information search and consideration of financial services brands. It uses data from two surveys of purchasing behavior. This study finds a surprisingly low level of consumer consideration, either by personal enquiry or via the internet. The most common consideration set comprised only one brand, and this was the case for both high-value and low-value services. The managerial implication is that services marketers should make brand salience a top priority, with the competitiveness of their offer not being the primary driver of sales. If a financial services brand is salient to a consumer, there is a very high chance they will purchase that brand, without extensive comparison of the merits of alternatives.     

Banks,customer relationship management and barriers to the segment of one

Technological advances are changing the nature of marketing channels and altering how consumers shop. The same changes are improving marketers' ability to capture and manipulate data, leading to an enhanced understanding of customers. Financial institutions are using these technological capabilities to target the individual needs of customers. As the benefits of customer relationship management (CRM) are brought to the fore, this focus on the ‘segment of one’ has become a feature of the service offered by some banks and financial services institutions. This paper reviews case study evidence of progress towards the segment of one and identifies the barriers that are impeding progress.     

Relationship marketing in the financial services industry: The importance of customer education,participation and problem management for customer loyalty

The effectiveness of relationship marketing efforts in services selling is to a large extent dependent on customers' commitment to increase the depth and breadth of their relationship with the organisation. In this study, we seek to extend current thinking by presenting a model that examines the relative importance of customer education, participation and problem management in driving customer loyalty. To test the relationships between these variables, we use data collected from 1,268 clients of a global financial services firm. Overall, the results support the hypothesised model and show customer education to be the strongest determinant of client loyalty. Current findings provide implications for multi-product financial institutions that are of theoretical and practical interest alike.