In this episode
In this episode, Rory and Dan discuss the critical importance of developing a solid brand strategy, especially in the competitive landscape of financial services. They explore the growing number of financial brands, the challenges new entrants face, and the essential components of a successful brand strategy. Aided by a case study of AccessOne, they illustrate how a well-defined brand strategy can lead to long-term success.
Key takeaways
- A solid brand strategy is crucial for market success.
- Targeting the right audience is essential for brand positioning.
- Brand equity and loyalty are built through effective strategy.
- Sales teams provide critical insights for brand development.
- The process of developing a brand strategy is vital for long-term success.
Transcript
Rory Holland (00:40)
Hey there, my name is Rory. I’m the founder and CEO at CSTMR.
Dan (00:45)
My name’s Dan, I’m the brand identity and brand strategist at CSTMR.
Rory Holland (00:49)
Hey, welcome to our podcast. This episode titled, Guiding the Growth, Developing a Solid Brand Strategy. Excited to get rolling on this one.
Dan (00:58)
That’s right, episode 2, Rory!
Rory Holland (01:08)
Excited to get rolling on this one.
Dan (01:11)
Absolutely. We’re on episode two, aren’t we?
Rory Holland (01:14)
Yes, yes we are. And before we dive into this one, Dan, I just wanted to reflect on a previous episode, if you guys haven’t listened, it’s called Your Bedrock of Success, Laying the Brand Foundations. And in that, we talked about three key takeaways. So if you haven’t had a chance to listen to that, we encourage you to go back and listen to that one as well, but this one’s gonna add plenty of value.
So let’s get through this one and you can go back and listen to that afterwards. So Dan, I wanted to go back to another thing that we had mentioned in the previous podcast. If you recall, I tried to go back in the time machine 30 years ago and tried to find out how many financial brands existed 30 years ago.
Dan (02:05)
And you didn’t get a very good answer.
Rory (2:06)
And if you remember, no, right? I stumped the internet and that infamous chat GPT. Couldn’t quite figure it out. So what I did in preparation for this is I just, I took a look back and said, okay, well, if I can’t get the information I need that way, I’m just gonna look more recently. And it was around the idea that thousands of more financial brands exist today than they did decades ago, and they continue to proliferate and grow as things go, which is making it even more competitive and more crowded and why it’s even more important these days to have a solid brand strategy.
So I wanted to just reference a couple of numbers. So according to the IBISWorld in 2023, get this, there were just under one million financial services brands.
988,000 to be more precise.
Dan (03:02)
Wow.
Rory Holland (03:07)
Does that surprise you?
Dan (03:08)
Well, It does actually. And I’m, and I was trying to sort of, as a designer, visualize that stat in my head and imagining a crowd of that many people, and then somebody saying, you know, you need to go and find Bob.
That’s all they give you, go find Bob. Where do you start?
Rory Holland (03:31)
Oh my gosh, right? Find Waldo map, you remember that? It’s almost like the find Waldo.
Dan (03:36)
Yeah, yeah. I think we call it we called it find Where’s Wally. I don’t know if that was a UK based thing, but it was called Where’s Wally.
Rory Holland (03:50)
I think it sounds pretty similar, but it was hard to find Wally or Waldo in the crowd, which is kind of why I referenced it the way that I did.
Dan (03:59)
Mmm. Yeah.
Rory Holland (04:02)
So I wanted to just, that is a big number and it’s growing every year, that’s what’s crazy. And the sad part about that growth is a significant portion of what I read is about 7,000 or 8,000 new US-based financial and fintech brands are started each year, or companies that is, a significant portion of those seven or 8,000 fail quickly.
Dan (04:03)
And that’s a big number.
Rory Holland (04:31)
And I think a portion of that failure is a lack of good planning, a lack of strategy. That’s my hypothesis at least.
Dan (04:41)
I’d be really, yeah, no, it’d be really interesting to know the statistics, to talk to some of those that fail and just find out what they did and didn’t do, that would be quite an interesting exercise, certainly from, well, from a brand perspective. Just tell me that number again, Rory, in terms of the new businesses that are coming out.
Rory Holland (04:55)
Yeah. Absolutely.
I don’t have the immediate stat for anything, but I recall reading about 8,000 new financial brands launched each year.
Dan (05:18)
About 8,000 every year.
Rory Holland (05:19)
And let me rephrase that. Yeah, let me rephrase that. About 8,000 financial companies start each year. Whether they turn into brands may or may not be true.
Dan (05:37)
And is that just the US then?
Rory Holland (05:39)
That’s just the US. I couldn’t get a stat on the global.
Dan (05:42)
Yeah. And so, you know, what was, you know, we’re saying that statistic. And I guess for the people listening, and if you sat there going, well, I’m one of those, this should be saying to them, well, I want to be, and then let’s imagine those 7,000 people are all queuing outside your door. And you know, how do you make sure the one that you opened the door to is the right one?
Rory Holland (06:08)
Mm-hmm.
Dan (06:17)
I’m just trying to put it into.
Rory Holland (06:21)
Sure. Again, I think of it as you’re one of, call it 8,000 new financial brands that are going to enter the market. But of your peer set, there might be some portions of those that are competitors to you. But then we’re stepping on the field. This is kind of how I describe it for our newer state, earlier stage clients Dan, that you know that we take to market is when you step on that field you’ve also got the current competitors and some are entrenched in the market.
They want to beat you quickly. They don’t want you on in the game. So you not only have to compete with this, you know, 7,999 others that portion of those might be direct competitors, somehow tangential competitors to you, but you have to compete with the big dogs, the guys and brands that have already built and established themselves in the market that you might be entering.
Dan (07:19)
Yea hadn’t thought about it that way.
Rory Holland (07:22)
It’s formidable.
Dan (07:27)
Okay. So in that case, let’s move this into a little bit more on topic of the thinking that these businesses should be adopting and how, you know, what we’re talking about in this episode is that strategic thinking from a brand perspective, but also a marketing perspective and you come at that.
Rory Holland (07:51)
Mm-hmm.
Dan (07:55)
If you haven’t listened to episode one, Rory is the marketing financial brains. And I kind of sit here and do the brand, the financial brand, but the brand thinking side of things with these businesses. And where do they start with this strategic thinking, Rory? Have you got a take on that? I know I have.
Rory Holland (08:13)
Mm. Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I do. All the opportunities that we’ve had to help launch new brands, create new brands, or refine and expand and grow existing brands have taught us a lot. And as we talk about today, the title of today’s episode is Guiding the Growth, Developing a Solid Brand Strategy. What I wanna reference here as we enter this conversation is brand strategy plays a crucial role in marketing.
And it’s instrumental in shaping a company and a brand’s marketing efforts. And I just want to just share Dan to kind of set the table here, a couple of key ways a brand strategy sets up a company’s marketing efforts. One, it helps define a brand’s unique identity. As we talked about last time, brands are three-dimensional, they’re organic, they’re living. So they do have an identity.
And your market is looking at you from different angles and through different lenses and frames than you maybe. So a proper brand strategy helps set that unique brand identity. Two, it helps us target the right audience. Then it helps us position the brand effectively in the market and create consistent, cohesive, and coherent and compelling messaging.
And then finally, it helps build what I’ve described is the brand equity and brand loyalty with the market that you’re going after. And then finally, it can help guide any kind of future brand expansions or new product and services that you might want to release. So those are, I tried to encapsulate Dan, just some of the things I think as a marketer, how brand strategy helps inform how we market.
Dan (10:12)
I couldn’t agree more. I think that all the points you made there are all relevant. And if you’re not thinking about them now, then you should be, because you’re probably too late. Right. To hear, you know, that take on from a marketing perspective, marketing and brand, they go hand in hand. And if you know, people, a lot of people say and talk about the difference between the two. And really, I think for me, brand, I think feeds marketing so that marketing can do its job in an effective way. And when, from a brand perspective, when we talk about developing that brand strategy, it’s, I think a lot of people will get confused and they think, well, what is, what’s brand strategy and where do I start with it all?
You’ve got to, I think, ask yourself some very fundamental questions, some deep questions is probably the best way to describe them. Because to bring out the right message for a brand to use, you often need to find out, you know, things like that initial mission. And I think we talked about this in episode one, where we discussed brand promises.
But until you really know why you’re in business or why you’re doing what you do, how can you then, you know, once you understand that you can then build out from it. And there’s, I’d actually pulled out a couple of questions Rory that, they’re not necessarily going to give you a brand strategy, but they’re the kind of questions that if you’re sat there going, well, you know, I don’t know why I’m in business or I’m in business to make money. Well, the questions that you should be asking yourself is a couple that I pulled out. If your business was bought today, what do you think the new CEO would do?
And I’m going to pause on that because that’s like, there’s quite a different, there’s quite a lot of different levels to think about that. You could be sat there as a marketer, part of a team within a business. You’re going to have a take on that. You could be sat listening as a CEO or a founder thinking, well, five years down the line, I actually do want to exit this business and if someone else comes in, what might they do? And so.
It should be getting your brain to kind of slot into this gear of where you want your brand to head and what do you want it to be known for? Is there a legacy that it’s going to leave behind? And this is only the start, Rory. This is like deep questions that start to uncover if you haven’t already, why you’re in business and the eventual strategy that you should be following for that brand to represent that vision that you had or have.
Rory Holland (13:30)
Yeah, that’s beautiful. That’s just part of the reason why I love what we do, Dan, is bringing the human emotional aspects to marketing. Because if you make it too one-dimensional or flat, it can be disingenuous, it could lack heart, it could lack meaning, it could lack purpose. And I believe we as humans, although we make purchasing decisions all the time, that there is some nuance in things, choices that we make that a brand, how we perceive it and feel it helps us make those decisions. And as a leader of a company, whether you’re an earlier stage founder or you’re running a multinational financial services or Fintech business, the same thing is true because people are buying your products.
So what you’re describing is at the essence of brand is what you want to accomplish through it. Like what are you trying to fulfill? And by looking down the road, which I think we often can be short-sighted, by looking down the road five years or so and asking that kind of question, I’m hoping it’s eliciting some different types of feelings and responses in our listeners.
Dan (14:56)
I do as well. And let me bring up this point here, or like an example that word strategy, all you have to do really is to think about what that word means. Okay, we’re talking about it as brand strategy and strategic thinking, but that word strategy can be applied to a lot of different things. And I’ll give an example of a sports game. Doesn’t matter what sport.
Who is a champion in that sport without a strategy? Who turns up to a game expecting to win without having sat down and thought about the best way to do that?
Does that make the word strategy simple? You know, these sports teams, they have to be strategic to beat that team. It’s the same for business, and that’s where your brand strategy comes into play, right?
Rory Holland (16:01)
What do you, a question for, maybe it’s coming up for our listeners, but I suspect it maybe is.
I sense there might be this sense that strategy is this nebulous thing. And when you put the word brand before it, it feels even more squishy for some. Do you experience that at all in the work that you do? And then how do you help people overcome that and find the real value in the activity of creating a solid strategy?
Dan (16:42)
I think that brand as a word is misunderstood or it carries a reputation from quite a few years back when brand was not so much finger in the air work, but people just seem to hang a really big price tag on it. And I think that there’s almost a stigma around what I’m going to have to spend so much on my brand.
And that is the first hurdle that you kind of come up against when you work in brand. And it’s an education piece, Rory, when we sit down with clients and talk to them about brand, I think if you put a cross in the right way what brand is and what it will bring to them, then they should understand it.
And if they don’t, you know, come back in a year, talk to us at a later date, because you know, we could, you could probably spend a week talking to some people and they just won’t invest. They won’t invest in it. They don’t understand, you know, what the long-term implications are of getting brand right.
Rory Holland (17:49)
Mm-hmm.
Dan (18:09)
Did that answer the question?
Rory Holland (18:11)
Yeah, we’ve seen the results of the work in tangible, measurable numbers. The work that we’ve been able to do over the last several decades and even more recently, I think if I recall, you might want to share an example or two.
But that the foundational activities that you’re describing and spending the time to build a proper brand strategy can pay dividends over time in helping you build your reputation. And one that not only is established, but one that lasts and grows over time.
Dan (18:51)
Yeah, you’re right. And yeah, we can give examples. We talked, didn’t we last episode about AccessOne and that brand. I think it’s fair to say that from my perspective, I know you like the numbers and I know like a lot of people that are business oriented, like those stats, but as a designer and a creative, what I really feed off is the energy and feedback as that brand is shown and rolled out to not just stakeholders, but as it starts to filter out into the real world, because we’ve had some really good feedback from the impression, the impact, the whole vibe and culture that has, you know, been lifted as a result of a brand being redesigned and revisited. It just has such a far reach.
Rory Holland (19:41)
Yeah. Hmm. So you’re what you’re describing for the audience. Think it’s a company called AccessOne. They’re in the medical payment space and we helped create a new brand strategy for them, an existing brand where they had acquired a mobile pay business and wanted to integrate this new mobile payment financial technology into their more core service payment offering.
And the question and challenge to us at CSTMR, how can you work with us to integrate this new solution and help that’s going to broaden our audience and help set us up for success as we go into market with this new product offering and supporting our sales and supporting the reposition of our brand, but then also setting us up for long-term success because we really want to own and dominate the market.
What you’re describing, Dan, I think is interesting is that the activities that we did to create that strategy, both written and digital, paid dividends, both internally in the organization and externally.
And me as a marketer, I love to hear what people think of our brands we create and the feedback we get from our clients about what their teams say and about what their market says. But what I really love is the numbers, which we don’t have to get into today and we can’t really get into specifics. But what we can describe is the fact that it really works.
Dan (21:17)
Yeah, it does. And I think if, you know, we think about what someone like AccessOne say, what we did for them strategically, I’m just kind of thinking about if anyone will be sat listening and wondering, well, what did, what did you do? What items were we, are we talking about in terms of a brand strategy? There’s things that need to be outlined and they would include things like making sure that we understand their goals. You talked about where they want to be and what they want to achieve. That’s really big for a brand strategy. Defining target audiences.
So understanding who they want to connect with. And that will mean that we can better help them with how to connect. Creating or finding if they don’t have this, you know, what is your unique selling proposition, USP or, you know, kind of key selling point, different words and labels. That’s kind of like, if you can’t word that, then you’re going to struggle because you’ll probably fall back on something like price more often than not.
Once you understand a lot of those things, you’re then able to say, well, here are our key messages and this is how we could communicate or get our audience to relate to our brand. And then we kind of, I’m gonna go into the next bit, but that’s where you start to talk about tone and how that happens. We’ve got that coming up in the next episode, so I don’t wanna go further than that. But yeah, those are the kind of early steps in terms of brand strategy that we’ll be looking at.
Rory Holland (23:07)
Yeah, and what is that for our listeners? Can you maybe describe that a little bit? Like what is that experience? Like what’s the process you have to go through for that? Is it months, weeks, hours, days? And what is it, what do you see like as an effective approach to that?
Dan (23:27)
So the most effective approach that we found is to do often one-to-one workshops. So taking those key stakeholders in the business and sitting down with them and grilling them, you know, sitting down and finding out where they are and where they wanna be. Because what we’ve got to do is kind of tap into that, you know, what’s in their minds. So workshops where we can, you know, if it’s not stakeholders, we can get teams involved.
If we want marketing that wants to play a role in the brand, get them involved. And we try, you know, I try and make it as interactive as possible, Rory. You’ve been in on a few of the workshops and if it’s boring, you don’t get the results out of people, you know, you’ve got to get people to open up. That’s a big part of brand is, you know, really getting them to say what they think.
We’re, I’m a designer, I’m tough skinned. You’re a marketer. You’ve been critiqued most of your life. We can take it, you know. So yeah, to, in order to, you know, understand and get all these strategic points out workshops, one-to-one sessions, some research. Cause of course we need to understand what that marketplace looks like. Every client is different more often than not. So we need to understand what you’re up against.
Rory Holland (24:33)
Mm-hmm.
Dan (24:57)
How are other people doing it? Do we want to follow suit? Are we trying to beat them at their own game? Are we coming at it from a different angle? So there’s a certain amount of research that would go on as well. And yeah, so that’s, I guess a glimpse into the process and what actually goes on to document and uncover a brand strategy.
Rory Holland (25:22)
What types of roles are involved in that process? Roles in the business. So are there executive level, from a client side.
Dan (25:31)
From a client side, ideally with brand people that make key strategic decisions. So I need to be talking with founders and CEOs, but at the same time, depending on the size of that business, they will, or we will probably want to talk to, you know, presidents of marketing. I don’t know the whole structure of things over there in the U S where it’s quite different over here, but VPs, people that are at the top of leading that marketing decision, strategic thinking side of the business.
Rory Holland (26:16)
Dan, how do you see in thinking about a few of our clients that are in, have long-term, have long sales cycles? What is the role of sales in maybe some of these conversations?
Dan (26:34)
I mean, if you’re speaking with marketing, they’re gonna be voicing sales paying points more often than not. When I’m trying to now think if I’ve specifically had sales, you know, key figures from sales within any of these brand sessions, I think I have, but going a long way back, but anyway.
Rory Holland (26:58)
I recall, I recall, yeah, I recall that we have that’s part of the reason why I asked the question is I wanted the listeners to understand that having a good dynamic brand strategy, the more stakeholders you can have involved appropriately, right? We don’t want to make it a committee decision. But at the same time input from folks who are in and around the brand every day and have something to say and share that could be useful to you and our team to put together a more well-rounded strategy, I think we found to be very helpful.
Dan (27:38)
Well, you said that far better than me.
Yeah, I agree. If you’ve got a sales team member, a director, you’re bang on because they’re at the, you know, the coal faces, we would call it, they’re doing the good work, they’re hearing what customers are saying. They kind of have that live, I guess, brand firsthand experience, you know, that perhaps, depending on the size of the organization, they’re going to be able to tell you some home truths. That’s some good stuff right there in terms of brand.
Rory Holland (28:17)
Yeah. And that’s what you want. You want the, what I described into the boots on the ground, like what’s happening in the field and whether there’s different orientations to that if you’re a consumer-oriented product that is purely digital focused or say, mobile app is your core service is how you’re delivering your services, the sales conversations of it different than the folks that are out in the market trying to sell, say, enterprise level sales software or varieties of different.
So we have the benefit and we’ve had the privilege of being able to be exposed to all these different types of scenarios in audiences and in market types and products and services and short sales cycles, long sales cycles. So it’s really part of
what we do here that makes it so much fun is we get to bring all that experience. And I kind of let texture of almost patchwork of all these different experiences together to bring value out through our work, but enough about us. The process is what’s so important in the commitment, as I hear you say it, Dan, the commitment to go through the process with the stakeholders and make the investment to do it properly, whether you’re just getting started, you’re off the ground in early stage and you’re getting some traction, but you wanna make sure you’ve got a good foundation under you so that five years from now, you can look back and say, boy, I’m really glad I built my house on rocking concrete and not sand. Because we’ve seen that other flip side of it too.
Dan (30:01)
Yeah, I like that analogy. Because if somebody can make, put that time in, I often find that it benefits them as a person as well. You know, whether they are that CEO or whether they are that head of a department marketing wise, it’ll help them because if it’s, if that strategy is not there then you’re going solo. Okay? You’re kind of coming up with something off your own, you know, of your own invention, which to you probably looks fantastic because you’ve gone about it how you want it. But we have to think that this is a business, a brand, and it needs to be presented as that business not personal taste, kind of going down a different road there, but you get the idea.
Rory Holland (31:10)
It’s bigger than us. And I say that word us, meaning me and you and the client, it’s bigger than that. It’s about the audience, it’s about the market, it’s about fulfilling our promises. And so to do it correctly, you’ve got to bring in other folks and take multiple facets into consideration. Again, I know we’re kind of beating a dead horse here. Like, I hope the listeners are hearing how important a proper brand strategy is and why we’re leaning so heavily into this as an episode on its own, the importance of developing a really solid brand strategy and how it sets you up for long-term success.
Dan (31:57)
Absolutely. I’m checking my time Rory, are we doing for this episode?
Rory Holland (32:03)
I think we’ve done pretty well, Dan, right on time. Appreciate you sharing your experience and your insights. I hope the listeners found some value in this and be sure to come back for our next episode. Dan, you wanna do just a light intro for what’s coming next?
Dan (32:22)
Why not? Yeah. Cause if you’ve listened this far, we definitely want you to go on listen to episode three. And the episode that we’ve got planned next is all about giving your brand a soul, giving it a soul, crafting your brand’s personality and style. Does that fall in my wheelhouse Rory?
Rory Holland (32:43)
Oh man, well you know how I love the soul. So and yeah, I’m excited about it. I think it’s going to be wonderful. Please join us. We’re looking forward to it. Thanks again for the time today, Dan. He’s ready to go. All right, brother.
Dan (32:55)
Thank you very much for listening. And the dog likes it as well. Tune in next time.
