Is Your Financial Services Brand Future Fit?

The financial services sector has changed massively in the last few years. The dawn of the ‘digital first’ age has meant that the way the sector’s brands interact with customers is a world away from 10-20 years ago. Brands very much used to set the agenda for the relationship with their customers, with customers having little or no opportunity to influence it. Now, consumers need to be at the heart of strategy and objectives and have much more autonomy and a role in shaping how things move forward.

As the world has changed for brands, so the way they are managed has needed to adjust. To manage a brand effectively, measuring how it is performing so action can be taken is critical. An essential part of this measurement is to accurately reflect how people perceive and interact with brands.

Our Brand Health solution (which is an integral part of our Toluna Start platform) is called hi brands and has been designed in conjunction with Aston Business School. It fuses traditional brand health metrics with elements which appreciate the need to look to the future and the buzz (often driven by online) surrounding brand. This is encapsulated in three key pillars:

• Knowledge and Equity – the here and now, based on traditional brand metrics from awareness through to consideration and recommendation
• Future relevance – looking forward and the ability to meet consumer needs and, therefore, be relevant
• Vitality – excitement, buzz and sense of community surrounding a brand

On our Toluna Start platform the results are presented automatically in a dashboard which shows brands ranked on an overall hi brands score, on the three pillars mentioned above but also the individual metrics which feed into the pillars and hi brands score.

Visually, a ‘strategic matrix’ can be produced which plots knowledge and equity against future relevance with vitality being depicted by the size of the bubbles. The four quadrants, and examples of bubble size are shown here. If we think about retail banking, the long-established banks tend to be clustered together between the ‘strong’ and ‘compelling’ quadrants, the latter being where all brands aspire to be. Challenger banks, however, are taking up a stronger position in terms of future relevance and vitality in the ‘challenging’ quadrant – these brands are well positioned to build on knowledge and equity and become the compelling brands of the future.

For more information on what Toluna’s platform can do for your brand, watch our latest brand health webinar on-demand here.