TD Bank locked in a 20-year naming rights extension this month with Boston’s TD Garden arena, home to the Bruins, the Celtics and hundreds of mega entertainment events each year. From a marketing perspective, awareness is the obvious play here. But it’s one tactic out of many that supports community-building in specific markets.

“Our brand health is incredibly strong as a result of the fact that we are actually present in the community,” TD Bank CMO Tyrrell Schmidt told Chief Marketer. “And community is core to what we do from a sponsorship perspective.”

In addition to the naming rights, TD has a slew of activations and incentives designed to connect with fans and locals, including $15 million toward community programs, TD-themed events, concession discounts and rewards, and more. We spoke with Schmidt about the sponsorship, digitization of the customer experience, how the brand is using CTV to drive consideration in local markets and its overall strategy for growth.

Chief Marketer: What are the strategic marketing goals of continuing with the naming rights for TD Garden?

Tyrrell Schmidt, CMO at TD Bank: We extended our marquee sponsorship of both the TD Garden as well as Boston Bruins for a further 20 years through an early renewal. It kicked off in 2005, so it’s a 40-year partnership, which we think is historic for sponsorship. It solidifies our commitment to the Boston community and retains the beloved Garden name, which is something that we brought back to Bostonians in 2005.

There’s a lot of passion around that. It also gives us critical opportunities to engage with our customers, with our fans and with our communities, which are important stakeholder groups for both organizations. We have alignment in terms of strategic priorities, how we bring this to market, and who we bring it to market for. It also gives us an opportunity to be part of the fabric of the community, to drive engagement through our shared passion around two of the winningest teams in sports, and from a TD perspective, it gives us great visibility for our brand throughout our footprint.

CM: What are the KPIs for this partnership?

TS: Sponsorship is an important part of our overall marketing mix. Firstly, it can be very local. We have over 750 local partnerships and sponsorships, and they all tend to meet the objective of driving brand and allowing us to engage with our customers, because sponsorship is one of those ways that you can come into contact with your customers. That’s critically important when we think about the TD Garden. We know that our brand health is incredibly strong as a result of the fact that we are actually present in the community. And community is core to what we do from a sponsorship perspective.

Through this deal, as an example, we will give $15 million back to local communities in and around Boston, which is important as we think about our community focus, about diversity and inclusion, and bringing our brand to multiple different segments across these communities. It allows us to deepen our business relationships. An example is our small business takeover, where we share our [ad] space for a night with a small business. Someone who we have a partnership or a relationship with will really benefit from that type of awareness and visibility.

We’ll also invest in what we call Access the Arts. One program under that is called TD Guest List, which gives complimentary tickets to events all year to groups that are nominated or individuals from an underserved or an underrepresented community. We also have the TD Garden House Artist program that commissions local artists from underrepresented communities to create transformative art in and around the TD garden.

CM: Can you talk a bit about your cause marketing strategy?

TS: Firstly, we don’t really think of it as cause marketing. We think about it as delivering on our purpose. And our purpose is around enriching the lives of our customers, our colleagues and our communities. We have a program that we call the Ready Commitment that serves to guide where and how we support our communities. For example, [with] diversity and inclusion, it’s making sure that we are building an inclusive future for all—things like housing for everyone. Giving access in communities where they might not have the same access to banking and banking products is critical to what we do in our communities. And sponsorship is just one way to do that, but it is a deeply-held belief at TD, holistically, that we are here to enrich their lives. That’s more than just selling products and services; it is about making sure that we are building that inclusive and sustainable future for all.

CM: How did the pandemic shift your marketing tactics?

TS: We’re in a rapidly changing world and environment. That is something we always pay attention to. We know that community needs change. We understand that consumers’ needs and expectations of banks and of other companies evolve regularly. Our customers tell us that they are looking for ease, for value and for advice.

From an advice perspective, 40 percent of consumers say that they are financially worse off than they were a year ago. We believe that we have a role to play there. That ties back to our brand, of being unexpectedly human and understanding that behind every transaction our customers have with us, there’s a story. That is what makes TD differentiated in the market: our focus on the human behind the story. We believe that people matter most.

One other important proof point around what’s changed is this: Consumers want to be able to access you when, where, and how they want to. Especially over the pandemic, when overnight everyone was doing banking online, we made sure that we were bringing our human proposition to bear, no matter how people interact with us. It’s not just in the person-to-person interactions.

CM: Following up on that idea, digital transformation has been necessary for most companies in the past few years. How are you digitizing the customer experience?

TS: We are looking at the digital experience, but looking at it within the context of an omnichannel experience. We know that consumers have different needs and they will use channels for different reasons. Historically, we were very much an in-person, go-into-the-branch environment. We still have customers who that’s really meaningful for, but increasingly we are seeing that people are doing less complex transactions, in particular online, and they want to be able to do that 24/7, at a time that works for them.

But if you talk to consumers, even younger consumers who we think of as digitally-native, they probably won’t [often] go into a TD store or a bank branch. Yet we know that there are times [that they will]. So if they’re getting ready to, for example, get a mortgage, something that’s a little bit more complex, or something they’re doing for the first time, they will want to come in and often seek advice in-person. We need to be able to serve our customers how they want to be served. And we need to make the experience feel more human.

For TD, one of the things that I think has made us stand out is our approachability. Regardless of how we’re interacting with our customers, we have what we call a conversationalist tone. Banking itself can have a lot of jargon; it can have some complexity. We aim to make the experience one that our customers find easy, that gives them advice, whether it’s what we call “big A” advice or “big wealth” advice, right down to needing a tip or some guidance.

CM: Are there channels you’re working with in the coming year that are new for you? What are you experimenting with?

TS: We’re constantly testing our media mix. There are more channels and different ways to reach consumers—and different consumers prefer different media. One example is CTV. It’s an interesting space for us. When I think about linear TV versus CTV, at the end of the day it starts with your objective. Increasingly, we are looking at local objectives, so looking at our core markets and understanding that in some markets we’re relatively new. We don’t have a big store presence, nor have we had a big marketing presence historically. So we need to focus on getting reach in those markets and building awareness.

But where we’ve been in a market for a long time, where we have a defined, prominent presence, we’re leaning into more consideration and further down-funnel activities, and connecting those. And evolving the media strategy to drive that. Something like CTV is great for a market where we have a lot of awareness but not as much consideration.

CM: What’s TD Bank’s growth strategy for the coming year?

TS: With the acquisition of First Horizon, TD will be a top six bank. We’re a top 10 bank currently, so growth in our core priority markets will continue to be critical. We see a couple of opportunities from a marketing perspective. One is to continue the growth that we’ve had in our core products across our customer base. And marketing plays a critical role in that. Internally, we’ve continued to work with our product partners in new and different ways through agile models, et cetera, to drive more and more growth through marketing where marketing is making an even bigger contribution than it has in the past.

Secondly, we’re a steward of the brand, and connecting that to customer experience. When customers do business with a brand that has values similar to their own, and then also delivers a customer experience in line with the brand promise, that drives loyalty and builds trust. Those are things that really matter to people as they look to deepen their relationship or expand their relationship with you. Marketing’s role is crucial in both of those areas. But it’s not just marketing who can own brand and the customer experience. It needs to live across the organization.

The third area for us is to move beyond customer acquisition and deepen engagement with our current customer base. Currently, we have a wide customer base. By understanding customer needs and being able to make seamless, connected, relevant personalized experiences, we will drive a better experience for our customers and be able to expand our relationship with them.

CM: Being a CMO of a large bank, what kinds of trends are you looking at right now? What should marketers be paying attention to?

TS: Obviously from a bank perspective, constantly looking at the landscape, how it’s evolving, what’s going on in the macroeconomic environment is critically important. And making sure that you’re building product services and being there to help your customers as they navigate some fairly uncertain times. That’s important in banking, but it’s important beyond banking. It starts with understanding consumer insights, staying relevant and staying up to speed with those trends and with those insights, because customer behaviors are evolving faster than they ever have before.

There is also a trend toward a much more personalized experience. I don’t think customers look at one category any longer. They are judging every company by a “best of the best” [mindset] and defining who the best of those companies are. And then thirdly is purpose. Especially in an uncertain and evolving world, purpose really matters to consumers. Understanding what your purpose is, what gets you and your colleagues up in the morning, why someone should be a customer or come to work with you and stay, is crucially important. Increasingly, we all see consumers wanting to do business with companies who have aligned values.

CM: Lastly, what are some qualities or attributes a marketer aspiring to reach the C-suite should be honing?

TS: One of the things that I constantly talk about is being open to different and new experiences. Marketing is evolving pretty rapidly, so getting breadth of experience is important. Sometimes people think about their career in linear ways, like “I need to move to the next level.” It’s also about understanding what experiences you need to get to the C-suite. Be open, be willing to try new things. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to stay in that role forever.

For me, in our culture at TD and at other companies that I’ve worked for in the past, I urge people to think about “the what and the how.” What you deliver is important. Taking accountability for your area is critical, but it’s also the “how.” I’m a big believer in building relationships. As companies look to build more agile structures, being able to work with different groups of people on aligned goals and aligned KPIs and outcomes is important.

And then, be open to change. We often talk about change like it’s something bad. Change can actually be so energizing and exciting. So, it’s not being afraid of it. We are always changing, we’re always evolving, and that’s not going away anytime soon.

The post Brands on Fire: TD Bank CMO on Sponsorship, Supporting Local Communities and CTV appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Social media influencers are frequently tapped by fashion and beauty brands to promote their products. But finance companies can experiment with influencer marketing, too. Take Kasasa, a fintech company that partners with local banks and credit unions. It capitalized on the “shop local” trend with a video campaign urging consumers to switch to or open new accounts at community-based banks. AdExchanger looks at how one brand is applying the “going local” concept to finance institutions—and the challenges that entails.

The post How Fintech Company Kasasa Tapped Influencer Marketing and the ‘Shop Local’ Trend appeared first on Chief Marketer.

The future of marketing depends upon two critical functions, according to Broadridge Financial Solutions’ Global CMO Dipti Kachru.

“You’ve got to obsess over your data strategy and your tech stack to be able to optimize and automate,” she told Chief Marketer this week. “That foundation is what’s going to help you deliver value, help you measure and prove that value add, and help you know what’s working and what’s not working.”

In addition to that, it’s important for companies—particularly those with brand marketing stories that are less obvious—to harness the power of storytelling. “We’re spending a lot of time with the team on how to break through the complexity of our business and make it more intuitive to people—because we have a significant role in driving the markets, but most people don’t realize that,” Kachru said. “We’ve got to work a little bit harder to be able to define how and why we are relevant, not just to the people buying our products, but to the industry at large.”

The former J.P. Morgan Chase CMO discusses her strategy for growth since joining the company seven months ago, the marketing tactics and investments CMOs should be prioritizing amid economic headwinds, how the democratization of investing is influencing the firm’s insights and solutions, and more.

Chief Marketer: Who do you count as your customers, and where are you looking to expand?

Dipti Kachru, Global CMO of Broadridge Financial Solutions: We’re a global fintech that provides technology infrastructure and communication solutions, so we primarily sell our solutions to asset managers, wealth managers, capital markets, firms, hedge funds. We’re talking to technologists, to operations and to the front office, because of our range of products, [which are] technology solutions as well as data and insights to help make better decisions around business strategy distribution. We’re also doing a lot of innovation on the client communication side and now talking to CXOs, chief digital officers and marketing leaders to think about how essential, critical communications, or even regulatory communications, can be leveraged as touchpoints to add value with our customers. We’re also doing a lot of work in healthcare now from a communications perspective.

CM: How are you are approaching brand marketing? What are the challenges there?

DK: A lot of people know us from being a premier player in the corporate governance space. We’re reframing the brand to be relevant to some of the newer audiences we’ve been talking about. It’s not this big brand effort that you expect to see in B2C, but rather a very surgical effort to continue to refine how we talk about ourselves, how we tell the stories around what we do and how we do it.

CM: Can you provide an example of that fine-tuning?

DK: Our wealth management business has multiple facets, where front-to-back platform providers help broker dealers and financial advisors operate in their roles. In the broker dealer ecosystem, what an advisor needs on their dashboard to help serve clients and how that connects through the processing and the back end is something we’re a market leader in. We’re being very specific in how we showcase what we do to that audience. It’s not just, “these are the set of products we offer.” It’s to help visualize what benefit that brings to market and to see it from the point of view of the user. In this case, our products are helping the financial advisor engage in more personalized ways with their client and use data to make better decisions to how they’re spending their time. The visualization of that is part of our journey of storytelling.

The other place where we’re starting to make a lot of inroads is in our insights business and how we’re using thought leadership specifically to bring through the intellectual capital that resides within the firm, given our unique vantage point within the industry and the amount of data we see through the clients we interact with. How we package those insights to then reach out to the audience is another way we’ve continued to harness the power of the firm.

CM: How does that thought leadership come through?

DK: It’s multichannel. You clearly find it on our website. We’re partnering with our PR firms to make sure that we develop the intellectual capital and it is being distributed in the right way. Social is a big strategy for us, which is something we’re building more muscle around, to distribute our content both from an organic as well as a paid perspective. The last thing is, we’re really building out our martech stack and our data capabilities to be able to understand both interest and intent from our customers to deliver more personalized communications to them, whether it’s relevant insights, news about what we’re doing or case studies we can share.

CM: How does sustainability factor into your messaging and the products that you offer?

DK: It’s a large part of it, as we play a significant role in the investor empowerment process. With the democratization of investing, more and more investors are coming into the market and want to know what they’re investing in. They’re very actively engaged around ESG topics. So, we are creating both solutions as well as insights for our clients. Whether it’s issuers or asset managers, we’re designing new products to understand what some of those critical data points are, what investors care about and how you deliver on those.

CM: What are the marketing tactics and investments CMOs should be prioritizing amid economic headwinds?

DK: I’ve been in the marketing business for 20 years, and there’s always ups and downs. Here’s the three things I think CMOs need to focus on. One is to have the ability to optimize and really understand marketing performance. It gives you the capability of being surgical when you need to pull back, and you need to know what’s working, what’s not working and be very aware about the strategic priorities of the moment. You’re not making sweeping changes; you’re being very specific.

The second is being agile as a marketing organization—being very planful in how we go to market, but building in the agility to be able to pivot and turn when you need to so you can capture both the moment as well as the opportunity, whether it’s to lean in or pull back.

The last thing I’d say—and we tend to do less of this, especially in headwinds—is to lean in to places where we can better deliver on the customer sentiment at the moment. So, by keeping your ear to the ground, very close to the consumer, whether it’s through individual interviews with clients, which we often do with pulse surveys, or just spending more time with the sales force. You start to understand how your clients or your customers are feeling and the role the brand can play that’s associated with their values, and being more empathetic versus being tone deaf. Also, when other brands and your competitors are pulling back, it creates white space for you to go in and establish or reestablish a connection with your most critical audiences.

CM: How are data and analytics reshaping the customer experience? And what role does privacy play?

DK: Data is critical to driving an improved customer experience. What we do with our clients, especially on the communications side, is about helping them harness the power of data to make the communications more relevant and engaging. Going the direction of more privacy-oriented rules is not in conflict with that. I think it actually gives organizations an opportunity to engage with the customer in a more authentic fashion. It creates greater trust when it’s the customer that’s giving you access to information. It reinforces that data belongs to the end user versus the organization. And by acknowledging that, it opens a channel of communication with the customer where, by earning their trust, you are on the hook for delivering value. And that drives more connectivity, and if you can deliver on it, certainly more loyalty. It’s a great opportunity for firms to continue to use data to better serve clients in more personalized ways.

CM: From your perspective, how has the pandemic has reshaped the B2B2C customer journey?

DK: The pandemic has been horrific for a lot of people. But as a marketer, one of the silver linings I’ve seen is the acceleration in digitization and digital adoption. In my current role, I see that happen everyday; we send about seven billion touchpoints of communication in a year. We’re seeing that migration from print to digital. It’s something we’re actively helping our clients through. Our data also reinforces that people are willing to go digital as long as it’s not just a replication of the print experience. You need to be able to rewire that experience to make it more engaging and add more value. There’s an acceleration in organizations investing in the transformation of their stacks, their data architecture, to be able to deliver that quality of engagement.

CM: You were recently CMO of J.P. Morgan’s Wealth Management division. What have you taken from that experience that you’re applying to your current role?

DK: I’m a big believer that marketing is a driver of growth for the firm. If you think about traditional B2B, that hasn’t always been the central driving reason that people fund a marketing organization. But my experience at J.P. Morgan only reinforced and strengthened that. I had a great privilege of leading marketing teams in the wealth space, the asset management space and in the consumer banking space, where we could take a lot of B2C principles on how you use data and automation to deliver value to the customer through the sales cycle and apply that to B2B.

A lot of what I spend time on with the team now is how are we building our data strategy and our technology to be able to facilitate the right outcomes in partnership with our sales teams. A large part of my focus is building that deeper bridge with the sales organization, not just philosophically aligned and in the trenches together and understanding what customers need, but importantly, does our technology work together? Are we able to power them with critical signals and beacons that help them be more effective at their jobs? And can we capture critical signals that they’re capturing as part of the sales process to make our marketing better?

The second one is the brand storytelling side. As a B2B brand, and a very complex one that serves many different clients with many different solutions, how are we strengthening our storytelling and going beyond just the words of what we do to better showcase what we do, whether it’s in video, whether it’s in the demonstration of our capabilities, whether it’s product demos. The third is bringing a sharper lens on the activation of digital strategies across the firm and how we go to market. There’s a strong foundation with incredible work that’s been done, but as we’ve grown and gotten more complex, we’re on a journey of marketing maturity as well.

CM: What are your goals for the company in terms of growth?

DK: We’ve got some work to do in building out our measurement infrastructure to be a little bit more predictive in the value we add. We look at performance as a marketing organization across three different areas. There’s work we’re doing on the brand side to drive perception of various critical segments that we are newer in. Are we engaging with certain customers more? Are they engaging with us through our content and our intellectual capital? Are we showing up with the right share of voice compared to our competitive sets?

The second one is enabling demand generation. We’ve got a demand generation ecosystem and we’re trying to light that up even more by understanding the connectivity of where the demand is being driven and how the demand is being converted so we can start to optimize. The third one is defining the scorecard around the sales nurture process. Marketing can help make the sales cycle more efficient by delivering relevant communications to complement the sales organization.

CM: Lastly, what are the trends that financial marketers should be following right now?

DK: It’s an evergreen trend you’ve got to obsess over: Will your data strategy and your tech stack be able to optimize and automate? Those are the two critical functions and the way I think about the future of marketing. That foundation is what’s going to be able to help you deliver value, help you measure and prove that value add, and help you know what’s working and what’s not working.

Second, while I’m obsessing over our segmentation strategy, targeting and tech stack to be able to get smarter and more effective, I also love the storytelling side of it. We’re spending a lot of time with the team on how to break through the complexity of our business and make it more intuitive to people—because we have a significant role in driving the markets, but most people don’t realize that. We’ve got to work a little bit harder to be able to define how and why we are relevant, not just to the people buying our products, but to the industry at large.

The post Marketers on Fire: Broadridge Financial Solutions’ Global CMO Dipti Kachru appeared first on Chief Marketer.

To promote financial literacy among middle school-aged students, Ally Financial recently teamed up with rapper Big Sean and popular computer game Minecraft to create “Fintropolis,” a world within the game that weaves financial lessons into the experience as players navigate through it. And as of this week, it surpassed one million downloads.

“Getting people to think about finance is a daunting task,” says Ally Financial CMO Andrea Brimmer. “So, we have to find engaging ways for people to have meaningful conversations around finance. We’ve found that gamification is a great way to do that.”

In fact, the idea for the Mindcraft world was the brainchild of four Ally interns hired from the brand’s Moguls in the Making program, a pitch competition that encourages students from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to become business leaders. The result was an engaging way for students to learn about money concepts. Chief Marketer spoke with Brimmer about Ally’s gamification strategy, its commitment to brand purpose and the company’s strategy of supporting economic mobility.

Chief Marketer: How did the partnership with Big Sean come about?  

Andrea Brimmer: I approached him on this idea of taking the notion of moguls and making it a bigger idea and doing something focused on kids in college and getting them to focus on entrepreneurship and creativity and innovation. They loved it, and the team at Ally took it and ran with it. We created Moguls in the Making and partnered with the Thurgood Marshall Foundation. We were able to focus on Historically Black Colleges and Universities and change the trajectory of so many of those students’ lives, whose stories we’ve been so touched by over the last three years of the program. So many of them have been the first generation to go to college. We’ve had students that have come through the moguls program that grew up homeless and couch surfed the whole way through college. It is really amazing to see the impact that we’ve made through this. And then to see something like Fintropolis come to life as a result of the moguls that we hired is one of the proudest moments of my career.

CM: How did the interns come up with the game within Minecraft?

AB: We have an incubation lab at Ally called TM studios. It’s a rapid prototype development lab that we use to create consumer financial solutions. And the winning team out of Moguls every year gets an internship with TM studios. So, the briefing that they got was, how can you make financial literacy interesting to middle school-aged kids? From a marketing perspective, we’ve had a long history of using gamification to try and make financial learning more interesting. These guys came in and said, why don’t we create a world within Minecraft that could be aimed at middle school-aged students that gives you all the tools that you need to know to be financially literate? Everything from budgeting to cash flow to taxes, to what’s my credit score to identity protection to investing. There are only 22 free “worlds” within Minecraft, and this is one of them. We also made it available to educators if they want to download it through school systems to teach kids financial literacy through the tool as well.

CM: How did you ensure it was free?

AB: Ally funded it. We partnered with a company to build it and it took 15 builders over five months. It’s the first full, featured financial education world ever in Minecraft. There’s nothing else that’s got this much financial education in it. We at Ally made the decision to fund the project because we believed so much in it and thought it would be—excuse the bad pun—another block in our strategy of using the notion of gamifying the learning of financial literacy.

One of the things that I’ve always struggled with as a marketer is [that fact that] teaching people finances is not the sexiest in the world. People don’t get up in the morning and say, oh, I can’t wait to go on my bank’s Instagram page, and get up every day and want to interact with your bank. But knowing finance is so important, and our kids just aren’t taught it today through the school systems. We’ve got a book aimed at elementary school kids called “Planet Zee and the Money Tree.” We’ve written two books in that series. We also put together a virtual reality world. Now we’ve got Minecraft. And we built an island in Animal Crossing for college age and above, which was also super interesting, all built around the idea of learning financial literacy.

CM: What are the strategic marketing goals this campaign?

AB: First and foremost, we’ve got a strategy around the notion of economic mobility and our role as a digital financial services company to help people learn about changing the trajectory of their lives through economic mobility. Secondarily is to get Ally on people’s radars. So, not only are you reaching kids an early age, but you’re reaching their parents, you’re reaching educators and others and increasing the knowledge base of Ally and what we’re about, our purpose and our brand. And equally as important is to give the students that we’re bringing in through Moguls meaningful, real-world experiences and opportunity. This was a really meaty project for them to be able to come in and bring to life and to have in their background and now on their resume.

CM: Why is gamification so prevalent in Ally’s marketing initiatives? How do you see the brand using it moving forward?

AB: It’s so important to us because we are a digitally-native company. Secondly, just getting people to think about finance, talk about finance, learn about finance is a daunting task because people are either not interested, scared off, it’s boring for them… or it’s like looking at wallpaper. So we have to find engaging ways for people to have meaningful conversations around finance. We’ve found that gamification is a great way to do that.

Third, it’s a prevalent way that people learn almost everything in life now. So much training is done through gamification. It’s a currency of the digital world, and we think it makes sense for us to sit in the middle of that currency, so to speak. We’ve used it consistently and persistently, and we’ll continue to do so going forward. We just signed a three-year strategic partnership with Twitch as their first financial services partner, which will give us tons of opportunity on that platform to bring the strategy to life. We’ve used it in everything from NASCAR, where we’ve created an Alex Bowman 8-bit driving game, all the way through to things like Fintropolis. We’re in the process right now of hiring a full-time gaming team within my organization that will do nothing but focus on gaming strategy and creating games that make sense around financial literacy. It’s a really important tool, if you will, in our toolbox.

The post Ally Financial CMO on Gamification, Economic Mobility and Financial Literacy appeared first on Chief Marketer.

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While some brands have kept quite during the pandemic, decreasing their marketing spend and communications to consumers, personal finance brand NerdWallet has taken the opposite approach. On the heels of its first-ever national brand campaign, the company is spending more money on marketing in Q2 than it did in Q1. The strategy was spearheaded by NerdWallet CMO Kelly Gillease, who believes that brands that aren’t investing during the downturn are missing opportunities—and may potentially be left by the wayside. We spoke with Gillease about the brand’s COVID-19 marketing, its rigorous growth strategy and her performance approach to brand marketing.

Chief Marketer: What challenges has your company faced, from a marketing perspective, due to COVID-19?

Kelly Gillease: I think it’s up to leaders to be vigilant and aware of what’s going on and also be courageous about learning from things in the past. It can be easy during this time to say we’re going to lay off people or do something that optically feels good, but isn’t the right thing in the long-term for the business. We’re in a good position at NerdWallet in that we’re not a tech company that’s pursued growth at all costs. We’ve been profitable nearly every year since we were founded more than 10 years ago. So, we’re in a good position to weather storms like this. And having built up this position, we’re focused on filling positions in our company. It’s a great talent market right now, so we’re continuing to hire folks, and focus on our long-term goals, developing products and services to help consumers navigate all of these new financial decisions coming up, or understand the financial impact for them from this crisis and what benefits are available, The Cares Act, all those things.

We’re thinking about how to increase our market share during this time. We’re a company that can lean into this and be helpful to consumers, and there are a lot of financial questions. Google shared with us that there’s a huge spike in people searching for financial help and advice, and we can step in to provide this as a company. So, despite the downturn, we’ve viewed the challenges as a great opportunity for us to adapt, to meet these needs of consumers.

CM: What new programs have come about?

KG: We feel it’s important to show up as a resource for people during this time and around these particular issues. So, we created a hub of COVID-related finance information and understanding the COVID economy. We linked to it from our homepage, but we’ve also disrupted our regularly-scheduled programming on social, in CRM, and we’re highlighting this content. It’s been very effective. Some of the highest engagement rates we’ve seen have been coming from this it is the primary thing they’re concerned with right now. We’re thinking about where our consumers are at and what can we do to be helpful to them, not continuing with day-to-day operations as we normally would.

We also did some adjustments to our brand campaign. In Q1, we ran a campaign called “Money Questions.” The ad for it has vignettes around the money questions people have, big and small. Some of them are trivial ones and some of them are really serious ones. It had very strong performance in Q1, but we realized going into Q2 that some money questions weren’t as relevant now. So, we swapped some of the questions out of the ad and adapted it to what’s top of mind for people. Building your savings, refinancing house versus buying a house, changes like that.

CM: How has your marketing budget shifted?

KG: We went into 2020 very excited to become the brand of choice in personal consumer finance. We embarked on our first, large national brand building campaign in Q1, which had the Money Questions campaign, on primetime TV. We’re excited about doing another campaign in Q2 and we’re running that now. Tim, our CEO, came to us and said, do you want to do something bigger than what you did before? We see a big impact in our business. So, we came up with a plan where we could pivot to do more. This was mid-February. And then the COVID impact started happening. We’re actually spending slightly more than Q1 in Q2, but it’s not the plan we developed to lean into a bigger budget and bigger impact. The pandemic changed how aggressive we were, but we weren’t willing to take things off the table that we thought were core to our long-term plan around growing our brand.

We’ve made other adjustments outside of our brand spend, like not doing the same kind of content in some of our channels that are earned. We’ve adjusted our performance team, which is tasked on driving profitable acquisitions for the company. They’ve obviously had to adjust in light of the pandemic and have scaled back. But we haven’t put anything dark for long or very seriously. We want to make smart adjustments and continue to keep our focus on our long-term goals and vision.

CM: What’s your spend outlook for the rest of the year?

KG: When we did our operational planning review, we only had plans on for Q1 and Q2 and said we would talk about the rest of the year as we saw the results of those two campaigns. If you go back, when we were doing our fall planning last year we hadn’t ever run a national campaign. So, whether or not that was going to be successful was a big question mark for us. We didn’t want to necessarily plan to do more than two of them. Now we are debating what we want to do for Q3 because of the media rates environment. There’s an opportunity for us there to potentially invest more cheaply towards our long-term goals around aided awareness and becoming a brand of choice.

We’ve got brand models internally where we’re trying to see how much less the media rates are going to be. What will our performance look like? Is that worth it? We try to make some decisions around what we want to invest in Q3, if anything. We’re not varying from the plan we have in the fall, and we may end up being more aggressive if we choose to do some level of spending in Q3. We generally don’t do much spending in Q4 of a brand nature. We still run our performance marketing, but for Q4 everyone’s very focused on retail. Finances are less interesting to folks during that time. Q1 is really our peak.

CM: What’s your growth strategy during this period?

KG: As I mentioned before, we have a model to calculate the return we expect to see both immediately and the long-term payback of big marketing investments, like our band marketing. We work with our finance team on that. We have spent a lot of time looking at that model, putting in different scenarios and figuring out how we can grow during this period. What opportunities are here for us? We’ve decided if our marketing can give a long-term payback that we want to see, which is around two to two and a half years, and if we think that our immediate balance sheet looks good for investing, then we’re happy to do it and continue to invest in our long-term growth plan.

Our CEO founded NerdWallet in 2009. He had been laid off during the Great Recession and it was something that came from a project to help his sister find a credit card. He ended up saying, I should put this stuff up on the web, and it became the NerdWallet we see today. We’re oriented around [the fact that] economic challenges and big systemic changes present a lot of opportunity. How can we look at the opportunity here to still grow? What decisions can we make? Also, keep in mind that these things are short-term. Even the Great Recession wasn’t long-term; it was a few years. So, we thought, why don’t we weather this and continue to grow our business? Getting great talent is really hard, and this is a time for us to be able to get some great talent that long-term will serve us well. Optically or psychically it may feel better to do a hiring freeze, to do layoffs. But that’s terrible in the long-term for growing your business. We try to make sure we’re thinking about these opportunities—cheaper media and the talent—because we’re a knowledge-based business and that’s huge for us.

CM: Tell me about your performance approach to brand marketing. Why does it work for NerdWallet?

KG: As companies grow, particularly Silicon Valley, direct-to-consumer companies, you start maxing out those traditional performance marketing channels. There’s a lot of focus on that initially because you can see the immediate return and it’s easy to see how your incremental dollars are paying off. At some point, though, companies need to assess when it’s time to pivot away from that and expand beyond those channels because you either need to grow awareness of the category or awareness of your brand in the category. Search is going to be limited by the amount of people searching for something. Performance marketing is around the people actively involved in a category. So, if people don’t know about the category or people don’t think your brand is very prominent within the category, then it can only do so much for you as a set of channels.

I think about it as this: When you have a strong performance marketing team, how can you compliment it and help boost their growth through investing smartly in brand? That makes some data-driven companies uncomfortable because they don’t see how they can measure that well, or know that investment’s paying off in the same way they do with performance marketing. But my approach has helped them to bridge that gap, because I take a quantitative approach. We have models with FP&A and are rigorous around our brand measurement and testing. So, it helps to put it in a similar framework as performance marketing. It’s easier for people to get how this helps other channels grow, how it helps the business grow and what the return looks like.

We can grow [the business] in a couple of ways—not just with the work that performance team does, but through work that other teams do, too. We have a diversified channel mix. Our bread and butter was SEO for a long time and performance has complimented that. And now, we have brand complementing both those things.

CM: What’s your measurement approach to brand marketing?

KG: Before you launch a campaign, it’s important to level set on your key KPIs. [Determine] the fitness function, and then think about the right benchmarks for the project. When we launched our first national campaign in late 2019, we did a series of tests leading up to that to see what campaign concepts did well. How did this move our business? What metrics should be expected to move and where do we think this is most impactful for us? Our key fitness function is aided awareness, so we’re gunning for a certain number of points of aided awareness we’ll get with each campaign as the outcome. Then we look at things, like traffic to our website and our monthly active users in our mobile app. Are we driving more traffic of quality level we’re happy with? Are people very interested and engaged? Are we driving registration?

We’ve seen a lot of down-funnel impact to the business that we also measure. It’s not the primary fitness function of what we’re looking for our brand marketing to do. I have a background as an economist, so I’m always building models and looking at how we can understand complex systems, all these different points of marketing. We lean on our models and our MMX model to assess if this is incremental growth, is this cannibalistic growth, is our marketing building and complimenting what we have today.

CM: What trends should marketers keep an eye on this year? What’s really critical?

KG: We’ve touched on this, but marketers still need to be comfortable with taking risks. When a company is doing well, it’s easy to take risks. But it’s also easy to fall into your routine because it’s based on your proven results. That’s not going to help you achieve your mission or have outsized growth, though. I’m always pushing my team, myself, to think bigger. This is a mental challenge more than anything, because even when there’s a strong safety net people are risk averse.

I try to encourage my team to think about what the worst-case scenario is and the probability of that happening—and how can we address it and move on. When you go through that mental exercise, it eases your mind. It allows you to think about the bigger picture and answer questions like, what’s the risk of us not taking action? What does it say about our culture? If we aren’t willing to take these kinds of risks, is that the kind of culture we want to have for this company? From there, it becomes easier to take calculated strategic risks.

That doesn’t mean you go out and do a national brand campaign and don’t do any testing beforehand. Be very thoughtful about these things. But right now, people are waiting for full recovery to invest in marketing, and I think that that puts you behind the curve. If you are waiting to see a full recovery, you’re potentially going to be behind.

The post NerdWallet CMO on Brand Building During the COVID-19 Pandemic appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Sure, it can be great to tell your brand’s story. But an even better approach is to bring it alive for customers and prospects, says Kate Gunning, new CMO of Investors Exchange (IEX).

“Actions speak louder than words,” says Gunning. “As marketers, our big opportunity is to demonstrate the brands that we’re telling the story for, rather than just telling the brand’s purpose.”

Founded in 2016, IEX is a stock exchange for U.S. equities. The company became famous when author Michael Lewis chronicled the story of founder Bradley Katsuyama and the way increased speed of data led to the rise of electronic trading in his book “Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt.”

Gunning joined IEX last month from J.P. Morgan Asset Management, where she was global head of brand. Prior to that, she worked for several different agencies including JWT, Portas and McGarry Bowen, where she worked on launches for brands like Kit Kat, Kleenex and Clarks Shoes.

In marketing, the goal for IEX is to find organic ways to demonstrate the brand story. Branded content campaigns with partners such as Bloomberg or the Wall Street Journal have helped accomplish that.  “The mediums that are the most effective depend on the business goals,” she notes.

“We want to be seen as a collaborative partner—that’s a story we’re excited to tell,” she says. “There a challenge to create buzz and awareness of how we can drive innovation in the market.”

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One example of innovation the company wants to promote is IEX Cloud. The new financial data platform came out of beta last month and provides financial data access for professionals such as developers building platforms and academics doing research.

“We want to make financial data more accessible to further the work they do,” says Gunning, noting the platform already has 10,000 new clients in 80 countries.  “There’s an organic opportunity to inspire fairness and innovation, starting with the financial market and expanding into other disciplines.”

IEX’s target audience varies on the area of business. For Investors Exchange, the target is brokers, investors and people working on U.S. equity desks. On the listings side, the audience is CEOs, CFOs and investor relations officers. For the cloud business, it is professionals like web developers creating applications for uses such as financial literacy.

“The marketing challenge is not so much about reaching decision makers, but understanding their behaviors,” she says. “We’re learning what their motivations are and ensuring we can paint a picture of how we can align with their needs.”

The sales cycle varies depending on the product. For listings, the conversation could take up to 24 months, because of the large number of decision makers involved. For the cloud business, it can be extremely short, because developers need information quickly.

As with many organizations, figuring true marketing ROI isn’t always easy. Some initiatives for IEX are more focused on cost per acquisition, while others might be geared to creating awareness or shifting sentiment. Trade volume before and after campaigns is considered, to see what happens when certain initiatives are in market

“Attribution is a challenge for everybody, and if they say it is not, they’re not being truthful,” she says. “Where marketing hits the sweet spot is when it is both attention grabbing, perception driving and business building. We want to understand what drives different kinds of lift.”

The post IEX CMO Kate Gunning on Why Brands Should Show AND Tell appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Synchrony Financial executive vice president and CMO Toni White has been celebrating the one-year anniversary of Synchrony’s IPO, and has a unique perspective on what it take to launch a new brand to both the public and an internal team. We recently talked with her about the impact of mobile and social on the retail banking brand, and what’s next.

CHIEF MARKETER: What big challenges have you faced over the last year?

TONI WHITE: The anniversary of our IPO on the New York Stock Exchange is July 31, and I think that branding a new, 80-year old company was a great accomplishment. You have a great, historic, iconic brand in GE Capital that we came from, but we really had to set a new path and identity. It started with a lot of work in understanding what our foundational strengths were that were part of our core—our financial stability, our operational excellence and our vast experience in the space. We’ve also been investing a lot in our digital platforms, around making the user experience super-seamless. And we launched our first national advertising campaign—our brand promise is “engage more.”

CM: How did you approach the challenge of establishing a new brand with clients, as well as your internal staff?

WHITE: We did was a lot of research with our partners to understand how they really felt about us as a company and how we do business together. We wanted to let them know that the day-to-day people they were dealing with would not be changing. We handled the other corporate-type branding stuff with a completely separate group of people. I think the biggest compliment we received from partners was that they never would have known that we were going through this, and that’s because we kept it separate. We’ve had great partnerships and we received a lot of great feedback from them throughout the process.

CM: How is the role of mobile evolving and impacting Synchrony’s marketing plans?

WHITE: We’re definitely seeing adoption rise with the ability to do everything with your phone or tablet. We have been working very hard to make sure that no matter what device that you’re interacting with us on, or whether you’re in-store, that you’re getting a good, holistic, seamless experience. We’re now building an infrastructure where 98% of what you could do in a desktop a year ago, now you can do on any device. People are on the move and they’re not always going to be home to make payments or check a balance.

CM: How are you leveraging social media?

WHITE: We’ve done some social media activities, and I still think we have a long way to go. We started to go out and put more curated content and research out there. I think we have a wealth of ideas that we want to bring out in the future.

CM: What’s next?

WHITE: With all that’s happening with digital wallets, we’re certainly engaging in conversations. From our perspective that’s going to be an area that’s going to continue to evolve. We have to be relevant to what our partners are looking for and what our customers are asking us to do to make their lives easier.

The post Q&A: Toni White of Synchrony Financial on Branding and More appeared first on Chief Marketer.