There’s great insight by HBR’s John Quelch once again this month, in an article entitled “How Financial Brands Should Market in a Recession.” Featuring his thoughts on just how damaged financial services brands like Citi, RBS, AIG and Merrill Lynch have been by this recession, Quelch argues that certain financial brands have completely lost the trust of the public (Merill Lynch and RBS specifically) should be phased out (and replaced by the less tarnished Bank of America and NetWest brands).
If you’re marketing into FS, there’s a lot of useful psychological and market insight in Quelch’s article about how this sector might go forward, and what it needs to offer product-and-service wise to get there.
He ends by speculating that the FS brands of the future may lie outside FS. He thinks brands like Tesco, WalMart and Google, those in whom the public have much trust for “doing no evil”, are well placed to clean up in the FS space now. Why not start talking to them now about this, especially if they’re already your customers?
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Last week’s results announcement from tesco only serves to back this up. Its financial services arm made a gross profit of £627m on loans and other assets of £6.2bn. The operating profit was £244m.
On his blog, Rober Peston commented, “At a time when many of the world’s biggest banks are struggling to make any profit at all, that’s a pretty handsome rate of return. The matter-of-fact confirmation today that Tesco is planning to become a “full-service retail bank” should give the willies to every traditional bank and building society.”
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