Making banks meaningful again
Joe Goldberg, joined Emma Sant from Futureful in a central London coffee shop, to share his passion for making banks more culturally relevant.
After years in consulting with the world's leading brands, he is currently Head of Brand Strategy at Santander UK. Prior to this, Joe advised some of the world’s biggest banks, and was head-hunted into his role at Santander.
Joe is intellectually curious about brands and how they build loyalty and connection, having developed his own perspective that challenges perceptions of how brands grow, and that people don’t care about your brand.
In our conversation, we explored:
The importance of good brand strategy in today’s sea of data
Brand differentiation within banking
Making Santander’s global purpose meaningful in the UK
How brands should think about platforms rather than products and services
The importance of good brand strategy in today’s sea of data
To kick off our conversation, Joe reflected how marketing has changed since his graduate years at Mars. Despite the corporate shift towards data science to unlock growth, Joe warns that corporate leadership should not downplay the value of strategy and creativity to define the direction of a brand, as without this, the technology will be misdirected.
“When I joined Mars, marketeers were the rockstars of the business. We were told that we would be future leaders. That meant that we had incredible power to decide on the brand and innovation agenda, and if we wanted a Malteser enrobed in white chocolate, then R&D would make it happen. Nowadays, R&D comes to marketing with innovations.
Today, it seems that marketeers’ creativity and strategic thinking is no longer valued by industry, even though it’s hugely important, and that the focus has shifted towards technology and data science.”
Clear brand strategy is required to help businesses and brands consistently organise themselves around their purpose both internally and externally.
Brands should focus on improving people’s lives
Jim Stengel, ex CMO of Procter and Gamble, and a strong advocate of brand purpose, states that large corporations shift from bold to old, over time, losing their sense of purpose as they scale. Many stop relentlessly obsessing about the customer and refocus on sales. Businesses need to consistently articulate and activate upon how they will improve people’s lives (he calls this a ‘life-improving’ ideal).
Cultural relevance, passion and belief enables brands to add value to people’s lives. Jony Ive’s passion for design at all costs, led to the reinvigoration of the Apple brand. Yvon Chouinard’s passion for the environment, and disregard for shareholder capitalism led to the success of the Patagonia brand.
Brand purpose doesn’t have to focus on saving the world
There’s a danger in today’s narrative that brands are only seen as passionate, or relevant, if they have a purpose deeply connected to an ESG agenda.
However, Unilever’s own CEO, Hein Schumacher, has recently admitted that as a purpose driven organisation, it doesn’t mean that every brand must anchor itself around ESG. Hellmann’s has recently come under attack for its battle against food waste and ‘being on the side of food’ being seen as disingenuous. Hein Schumacher told investors that they would stop force fitting purpose to their brands.
On a similar vein, it would be foolish to believe that a brand like Santander could claim to save the world, but it can make a difference to people’s lives in some meaningful ways. Yes, it should be responsible when it comes to ESG, but this shouldn’t form its brand purpose. Similarly, Apple in its September 2023 Sustainability Mother Nature video isn’t claiming that it will make less culturally relevant or aesthetically pleasing products, and the brand doesn’t generally put ESG front and centre, but it does talk with integrity about the actions it’s taking.
Not all banks are the same - the opportunity for differentiation
Customers in the UK can clearly see the difference between the big 4 banks, challenger banks, and legacy and current building societies. The big 4 are known for their functional superiority, whereas the legacy and current building societies are known for their emotional connection.
Following the 2009 financial crash in the UK, Lloyds acquired Halifax. One of the big management consultancies suggested that big cost savings could be made by merging the two banks and closing some branches. Data suggested that their customer bases were the same. Qualitative work, however, showed the brand perceptions were vastly different. In one research group, the Halifax was personified as Chris Moyles and Lloyds as Michael Parkinson. The imagery, colours and textures that consumers used to pull the brands apart were distinct too, from comfortable and welcoming to formal and professional. This also played out in people’s perceptions of the people, culture and services.
What should we make of the management consultancy’s data? People open multiple bank accounts to manage their behaviours, meaning it’s true that banks have a broad demographic base. Monzo provides people with savings pots and favourable currency exchange, people get a Revolut card before they go on holiday and open a Santander 123 account as a savings account. This doesn’t mean that people have equal perceptions of the banks they have accounts with, and the strongest relationship tends to be with the bank that their salary is paid into.
Open banking has led to aggregation of bank accounts. This presents a challenge for banks, but how they talk about it, also conveys how much they’re on your side …
When we used to describe open banking, our old copy said ‘you can now aggregate all your finances in one place’ … it described what you can do, but it wasn’t very customer friendly. It’s now been rewritten by one of our junior strategists along the lines of ‘it’s a good thing we’re not jealous … we get it… people have different accounts for all sorts of reasons … but just because you do you shouldn’t have to go in and out of the app, you can manage it all from here.’
How Santander is activating its purpose
Santander’s global brand purpose of ‘helping you to prosper’ was lost in translation and wasn’t driving the desired differentiation, affinity and aspiration. After semiotic and qualitative research into different articulations of prosperity, the UK strategy team were able to re-articulate the meaning of prosperity for the UK consumer it in a way that improves peoples’ lives, is seen as innovative, fuels good customer service, can drive affinity with the brand and can inspire great communications.
Our objective was to find human truths and understand our role in helping to improve customers’ lives. We discovered that prosperity in purest form is if you feel hopeful that you can change things for yourself and for those around you.
In our new definition both wealthy and poor people can feel prosperous and can see the way forward – today and tomorrow. With this insight, we can talk to the product team and CX team – this is meaningful and much more tangible than some of our competitors’ communications. For example, our customers can see how they can buy a house, stay for a few years to build some capital and then they can borrow some more while simultaneously increasing the property’s value.
Having clarity on prosperity meant the team also has clarity on both internal company culture, and how this plays out across Customer Experience, as well as product development and jobs to be done.
The concept of prosperity also connected with the fact that the desire to learn is one of people’s biggest prosperity goals. 86% of people pick this as important to them. Santander makes a little-known £8.5m annual contribution to people’s social mobility in the UK by giving them access to education and opportunities that they otherwise couldn’t afford and writing off student loans. This plays directly to the purpose of helping people to prosper.
The Santander Foundation, works across ESG objectives to help different members of society prosper, be it the financial independence of older people, or educating young children to be comfortable around money.
In addition, during the pandemic, Santander UK employees were encouraged to sign up as volunteers to make social phone calls to lonely and vulnerable people in the community through Age UK and Alzheimer’s Society. The Santander Foundation donated £1,000 to Age UK and Alzheimer’s Society (split equally between the two charities) for every employee who took part in this and other volunteering initiatives. This vital connection for many to the outside world, helped them to continue to prosper as best they could despite their isolation.
Finally, it invests millions every year in every market in support people through university and further education – all because of a core belief that education plays in helping people and the economies progress and develop.
Brands should think about platforms rather than products and services
There’s a big job to be done across the UK banking sector to regain people’s confidence. Not only do only 29% of people believe that banks are on their side, but change is difficult to achieve in a traditionally conservative and heavily regulated sector. Financial service brands have the headroom to become more helpful.
The irony is that people put their money with banks but feel that banks are not there for them. They think that we are not there to put them first and that we don’t have their best interests at heart. I don’t walk into Nike store thinking that they’re trying to make me perform at below my best. I go there thinking Nike wants me to win and we have to do the same.
To truly grow, brands need to start thinking about themselves as platform brands. In the same way that Honda provides engines across sectors to cars, motorbikes, aeroplanes, and generators, they have expanded their market.
Rita McGrath in her book, The End of Competitive Advantage talks to the need for brands to identify human truths in arenas that they can play in. Essentially, brands that learn to thrive in other people’s eco-systems will grow. This presents exciting opportunities for banks if they’re able to transform their mindset from selling products to the concept of working FOR people and considering the question, what work should we be doing for our customers? What’s the innovation that we can offer to people, can we be more helpful? Can we train you to be better with your money without patronising you?
Nike is the perfect example of a platform brand … spanning product to services and communities. From building motivational playlists, reminders and leader-boards in Nike apps, coaching and measurement in Nike Training Club, and building a community with networking, workout groups and local events with Nike Run Club. This in turn can be integrated with third party apps such as Spotify, iTunes and Headspace. ( Source: https://hbr.org/2022/09/building-your-own-brand-platform)
A final word …
People think banks are commoditised, but that’s not true. People do care about who they bank with. There is a role for banks to be meaningful – we’re not all the same. To believe that your brand can’t be cool or culturally relevant is a mistake – I passionately believe there is a role for a bank that is just cool. Just because it hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean it can’t. We’re working on it!
Read more Relevance Series perspectives here. These are personal and candid points of view on brand relevance. Participants include senior leaders at Pepsi Lipton, Mars Petcare, Beam Suntory, Philips Mother and Childcare, Mondelez, and Unilever R&D.