Is your brand under the mattress, gathering no interest?
When it comes to the brand positioning and creative output of financial brands, ‘interest-free’ is the phrase that comes to mind.
The classic ‘financial brand’ was always built on reassurance. No surprises please. The pinstripes, the purple, the navy blue. Stoic. Unmoving. Solid with nice, reliable jargon that told us everything was under control.
It all made perfect sense given the weight of the subject. Our entire lives are dictated by the state of our finances so of course we needed to feel confident that these financial monoliths were much bigger than us. That they could look after us.
Those familiar clichés became a time-honoured shortcut to trust. It was important for banks to look like banks.
But then, as it always does, the world changed. While the reliability factor is still top of the agenda – particularly now that the world’s full of scammers – reassurance just doesn’t look the same anymore.
Today, being seen as solid, familiar and old-fashioned is the opposite of reassuring. Today you exude trustworthiness by being up to date. Adaptable, truthful, relatable. A modern brand that cares about the way people live their lives right now.
McKinsey pointed out that “while traditional banks have been convenient one-stop shops, many haven’t evolved their products in a way that matches the tech-driven pace of change in other industries.”
But have they evolved their brands?
Well. Yes and no.
Most have certainly moved on from the old ‘corporate identity’ days. And most realised there’s a human, relatable aspect to finance that needed to be spotlit.
We’ve seen branches given casual re-fits – with staff brought out from behind the desks to meet us for a ‘chat’ on the couch. And we’ve seen a general softening of financial brand identities – with people brought visually to the forefront, and copywriting made a little less business-speak.
The problem, however, is now they all look and sound the same.
There’s been a total domination of ‘lifestyle’ scenarios in photography and film. Walks in the woods, dogs on the beach, women laughing at cups of coffee, suspiciously photogenic families gathered around laptops, phones and tablets. All cast in the same way, shot in the same way, and captioned with the same predictably smart-casual copy.
You could swap the logos around and nobody would even notice.
Why does that matter?
Because real people don’t care enough about brands to play spot the difference. Especially not finance brands. They give us a brief glance at best.
If our ads aren’t immediately distinctive, they’re not advertising our brand. They’re advertising our sector.
And the only brand that gains from that approach is the #1 brand in the sector. The one that comes into everyone’s head when they think of finance. The one who can spend the most on media placement.
So what about everyone else?
At StudioLR, when we talk about brand building we talk about guts. And there’s two sides to guts for us – substance and standout.
Substance is all about getting to the guts of your business. Poking around deep in the workings of your organisation, asking awkward questions about your vision, your competitors, your customers, your products and services. There is always something that makes you different.
Standout on the other hand is about having guts. Having the conviction to stick to your substance. To magnify it. Dramatise it. To follow through on it 100%.
Financial brands are always going to have to be reassuring and relatable. But there are 101 ways to do that. There’s no excuse for doing it the same way as everyone else.
It may be a heavily regulated industry with a serious subject, but that’s no barrier to sharp strategy and cut-through creative. To substance and standout.
The charity sector, for example, does a good job of taking serious, regulated issues and hitting them from different angles with diversity and individuality – with unique positionings, tones of voice, visual languages, and most importantly, ideas.
“Major financial players grow through acquisition, which means big companies have trouble settling on a single voice to present. Add in the watchful eyes of compliance regulators, and established organizations are content to make safe, bland content rather than fight for audience attention.”
– Forbes
We’re not saying it’s easy.
We’re not saying it’s easy.
This sector has a unique length of red tape. With financial brands we’re often working in complex corporate structures which stifle creativity and confuse strategy. But again – our customers don’t care about that. They don’t get to see all the corporate heavy-lifting that goes on in the background. They don’t get to read the Powerpoint decks. They just get to see a bunch of brands they can’t tell apart.
It’s on us to chop through the thicket, and carve our own path.
We can fool ourselves that we’re exercising restraint and maturity. That our risk aversion is the wise move. That boring, predictable, homogenous work is ‘safe’ and that’s what a reputable financial institution should be doing.
But as Forbes points out, “financial service providers can’t afford to lull their audiences to sleep… consumers are starving for better financial content.” And if you don’t give them it, someone else will.
Besides, the concept of ‘safe’ work is a fallacy. It’s been proven time and time again that more distinctive, creative brands are vastly more effective in their marketing. Sure, there’s an element of risk to creativity. Just as there’s an element of risk to investing. But it’s a calculated risk that we make with expert guidance. And it works. So much so that it’s considerably less risky to invest our savings than it is to leave them under the mattress to depreciate.
Just as it’s considerably less risky to invest your marketing budget on building a standout brand than it is to blend into the background.
So, go get your brand out from under the mattress.
It’s time it earned some interest.
To chat more about how we can help or to see some recent financial case studies email Dave & Andy:
Dave@StudioLR.com
Andy@StudioLR.com
