Financial Services & Institutions

Underpriced: The unexploited marketing opportunity in finance part 4

Didi Gluck, vp, editorial director, Manifest

There’s a persistent belief in marketing that the idea is the hard part, and that everything after it is just execution. Get the concept right and the rest will follow. But as a content and digital agency that’s worked with hundreds of clients, we’ve seen time and again that the top causes of delays and inflated budgets generally have nothing to do with the creative. They’re about things like the approval chain, misalignment, and asset management. Operational failures … every one of them.

According to a recent survey that ran in AdWeek, 98% of campaigns launch late and 70% exceed their production budgets. Yet most marketing organizations invest enormous energy developing their creative capabilities and almost none developing their operational ones. If this sounds like your organization, it’s likely costing you more than you realize.

The new competitive advantage in marketing isn’t just a distinct creative campaign. It needs to be paired with the operational infrastructure that gives a great idea a fighting chance.

Here’s what that looks like in practice, from Manifest’s project managers who thrive in the operational trenches every day.

Alignment is an ongoing discipline

Misalignment rarely happens at kickoff. It usually happens three weeks later, when someone makes a small call without realizing it changes something else and by then, the damage can be hard to undo.

“Most project failures are caused by misalignment, which compounds over time,” says Marissa Thompson, an account operations director at Manifest. A subject-matter expert brought in for one narrow decision, for instance, unintentionally steering the whole workstream off course weeks later.

The key is to confirm direction at every major inflection point, not just the beginning, asking whether the work still matches the brief, whether priorities have shifted, and whether anyone has an unvoiced concern. This process is baked into how we operate with every client.

Go back to your brief

Contrary to popular opinion, a brief doesn’t always have to be a formal document, it can live in a kickoff call, a project plan, or sometimes, a strategic, shared slide deck. “The format of the brief can be flexible,” Thompson says. “But the objective shouldn’t be.”

What must always be concrete is a mutually agreed-upon path forward. At Manifest, great work starts with a clear picture: what we’re making, why it matters, who we’re talking to, how we’ll know it worked, and the time and resources we’ll have to get there. Without these non-negotiables, even small deviations can send a project off course in ways that aren’t obvious until real harm has been done.

Create conditions for good work

Related to having a clear objective is having a well-defined way of working so you can bring your deliverables to life. Every marketer has been on a project where the work was good but the execution was chaotic. Things got lost. People didn’t know what they were supposed to do or when. That’s not the path to success. Getting the who, when, and where established at the start of every project creates the conditions for your team to do good work, says Emma Hecht, a project manager at Manifest. That means establishing who’s doing the work, how long they need, and where the resources live, so the team can stop guessing and start producing.

Edit your approval chain

Mapping the approval chain early provides protection from people chiming in at the wrong moments and causing unnecessary revision cycles, says Abisola Alade, a project manager at Manifest. And once a stakeholder has made a decision, it should be written down in a place everyone can find it. Nick Prayner, a project manager at Manifest, calls this decision logging. In a long project, that record is the difference between moving forward confidently and spending a meeting relitigating something that was settled three weeks ago.

Define done

“‘Done’ can be an expensive word if everyone on a project is picturing a different finish line,” says Eric Kanerva, a senior project manager at Manifest. That finish line needs to be the same for everyone on the project. Does done mean the assets are delivered? That the campaign is live? That the results are in? Defining done for each deliverable at the start of a project, not the end, eliminates a category of disagreement that reliably surfaces at the worst possible moment, when everyone’s tired and ready to move on.

Take temperature checks

Marketing is a high-pressure, deadline-driven, subjective business. When people don’t feel safe raising problems, they don’t raise them and errors that can cost time and money can happen. Regular live check-ins, along with the occasional unscheduled Slack message, turn potential crises into small talk—so they don’t end up needing crisis control.

Part 4: Banks don't have a relevance problem. They have a relationship problem.

Geoff Director, executive vice president of strategy, Manifest

My 2-year-old son has a giant playmat that looks like the street map of a town. I recently watched him push his toy bus through the streets of this town, picking up friends and dropping them off in various places. First stop: a pizza shop, of course. Then school. Playground, movie theater, grocery store. This mat has everything you’d expect in a tony suburban town square — even a coffee shop and fitness center. But I noticed one thing was conspicuously missing — a bank.

Once a prominent feature of quotidian American life, retail and commercial banks now exist outside our normal consciousness. They now find themselves in a commodified space, competing on parity interest rates and loan products, searching for a value proposition that consumers and businesses will find meaningful and unique.

The pressure on banks to keep up digitally is well documented, but their regressing stature in our society is caused by something much deeper than being behind on tech or UX. After all, as we discussed in the previous installment of this series, there are 10,000 fintechs on the bleeding edge of digital design struggling just as mightily to satisfy consumers (in their case because they lack the one intangible that banks do have: trust).

In fact, there’s a lot of data showing that if consumers (and small business owners, for that matter) had their druthers, traditional banks would be the centerpiece of their financial lives. The status is banks’ to win, so what is the real reason they’re teetering on obscurity?

It’s a chronic inability to evolve their relationship with customers. According to a User Testing study, 40% of consumers can’t distinguish between financial brands. And according to a Raisin study, two-thirds of Americans have switched their bank at some point. Banks are seen as featureless infrastructure, not the deeply rooted emotional center of customers’ financial lives.

Here we are in an era in which financial news media and interest in money matters are exploding. We know exactly what people’s greatest money concerns are, and there are major gaps for large swaths of the population. Economic tumult has people seeking new solutions and seeking institutions they trust, and banks are still unable to find relevance in our lives.

Banks don’t need digital transformation — they need strategic transformation to exorcise their predilection for traditional, feature-driven marketing, innovation, and CX, which lands them in the trench warfare of interest rates, fee claims, and digital assistants. And to find an entirely new goal, anchored on being indispensable in customers’ lives, and reorient their brands around it.

The new goal, and axis of competition, should be achieving the status of “customer advocate brand.” You see these brands in all kinds of categories, from travel to auto to packaged goods and beyond. I think of these as brands that make their customers their cause. Brands that people genuinely feel are on their side in navigating a particular part of life, and whose actions demonstrate a deep understanding of them as people.

Here are some attributes of advocate brands that I think banks could aim for:

Zillow’s helpfulness in a moment of stress
Peloton’s encouragement in the face of self-doubt
Apple’s insightfulness about customers’ preferences
Airbnb’s sense of community
Squarespace’s accessibility
Carfax’s ability to reduce intimidation
Patagonia’s dedication to a cause that its customers care about

There are a variety of tangible ways banks can get the boulder rolling toward customer advocate status. Let’s start with the most obvious one: personalization.

Advocate through data

I have long been a skeptic of personalized marketing. For most categories it amounts to arbitrary or inconsequential creative versioning — as if the motivations for buying a chocolate bar are so varied you need 75 different ads for the campaign to work. However, in banking, personalization makes perfect sense.

Banks sit on a gold mine of first-party data. They know a great deal about each customer’s financial picture. They know when something unexpected has happened. They know when someone starts planning for a big life moment. They should have a deep sense of customers’ habits, aspirations, and blind spots. But according to Accenture, only 3% of customers use personalized tools from their bank.

So instead of using this information to improve as a sales organization, use it to become better advocates. Instead of another “preapproved” credit card offer arriving the day after your customer’s paycheck lands, share a first-time homebuyer’s guide when they accumulate six months of rent payments. Turn a signal about inconsistent payroll deposits into proactive cashflow planning resources. Notice an SMB has two straight quarters of growth and introduce a customized line of credit offer. Don’t just predict the next product someone might buy, predict the next challenge they’ll face.

However, many banks lack the marketing infrastructure to do this. According to McKinsey, only 8% of banks say their marketing is “highly personalized across all channels,” and only 9% have the capabilities to drive personalized engagement at every customer touchpoint.

Advocate with rewards

In addition to personalized guidance, banks should reward customers in ways that feel like genuine advocacy. According to Accenture, 60% of customers want relationship-based rewards, but only 45% are satisfied with what they get (a 15-point gap) and fewer than 15% of banks actually offer relationship-based rewards, despite observing the success of loyalty programs in industries like airlines, credit cards, and hospitality.

That’s remarkable when you consider that no company knows more about what its customers actually value (i.e., literally what they’ll pay for something). Banks know who commutes every day, who travels for work, who has young children, who owns a small business, who recently bought a home, and who has started saving for college. Yet they continue to reward those vastly different lives with essentially the same cash-back offers.

Most loyalty programs reward spending, but an advocate brand would reward progress. Imagine suddenly waiving wire fees for a business hitting its first million dollars in revenue. Or paying for a first-time homebuyer’s inspection. How about earning dollars toward an LLC filing. Make the first contribution when a parent opens a 529. When a bank demonstrates that it is invested in the same outcomes as its customers, it becomes a true advocate.

Advocate through people

One asset that banks possess — and fintechs never will — is bankers. Actual people, working in actual communities, capable of understanding the nuances of someone’s financial life. Yet banks have steadily diminished that role. Too often, the job has become gathering information, feeding it into an algorithm, and presenting whatever product the system recommends. The banker has become a conduit instead of a counselor.

Remember when your banker knew your name? Neither do I. But consumers now turn to strangers on TikTok for financial advice. Independent financial advisors are adding life-coaching certifications because clients are seeking holistic guidance. People are actively looking for someone to help them make sense of life’s biggest decisions. So why can’t the banker fill that role too?

The modern view of the banker-as-advocate archetype should be much broader than classically portrayed. Not everyone can afford a high-powered financial advisor, and there are a million life questions people have that a banker would be better at answering than anonymous digital sources: How do you budget for a wedding? How do you figure out leasing versus financing a car? How do I improve my credit? How do I know when I can afford to hire my first employee? Instead of having bankers at the bottom of the funnel, long after someone expresses interest in a certain type of product, put them on the front lines of the brand, starting new conversations with customers.

Advocate through purpose

Lastly, there is an opportunity for some banks to achieve advocate status through a more brand purpose-driven approach. I don’t purport to understand all the intricacies of banks’ risk models, but there are enormous swaths of the population who at least think they cannot get access to even basic banking functions. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, around 25 million U.S. households are underserved by traditional financial institutions. Nearly half of small businesses that borrow from fintechs were unlikely to have received credit from banks.

What better way to show that a bank is a consumer advocate than to help consumers access banking services. Even if just focused on certain products or programs, having (and openly talking about) a strategy to broaden the tent will have an outsized impact on a bank’s reputation. These cohorts may not always have the deepest pockets today, but they’re the wealth builders and homeowners of tomorrow so earning their trust isn’t just good citizenship, it’s good banking.

Back on the map

For banks to restore their place on the proverbial playmats of Americans’ lives they must move from product and feature companies to indispensable consumer advocates. And the best news is, there are many roads to get there, and consumers are hoping you do.

We’d love to help

We hope you enjoyed this series on the “underpriced” marketing opportunities across the financial services industry.
At Manifest we love a good problem, and the dynamism and complexity of financial services gets our blood up like little else. We hope it came across.

If you’d like to get a copy of our Top 10 List of Marketing Moves for Financial Services or to hear more about how we could help you, reach out to hello@manifest.com.

Explore the series

Underpriced: The unexploited marketing opportunity in finance

Part 1

Finance built empires without marketing. The next chapter won't be that generous

Part 2

The next generation of wealth has never heard of you. Time to introduce yourself.

Part 3

10,000 fintechs. One underpriced asset: trust.

Part 4

Banks don't have a relevance problem. They have a relationship problem.

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