At a recent Financial Communications Society lunch, Jaime Kalfus, Global Head of Brand Experience at J.P. Morgan Asset Management, presented a behind-the-scenes look at the creative strategy driving the firm’s new brand campaign. We were intrigued to see how her experience of the challenges in developing a specialty financial services brand…
It’s been a few months since the initial shockwaves from the Wells Fargo scandal stole headlines and took over public discourse. In a true sign of the times (or perhaps the results of a presidential election that felt more like a reality TV show), the public (or at least the media) seems to have…
According to the Harvard Business Review, “study after study puts the failure rate of mergers at somewhere between 70-90%.” More often than not, brand is not promoted or leveraged to provide unity, clarity and solidarity during this critical inflection point, yet brand can make all the difference between success and failure for the companies…
There are two assumptions about taglines we often hear during branding initiatives. They go something like this:
#1: To stand out, a company needs a tagline.
#2: When a tagline fails to catch on (and therefore fails to help a company stand out), it’s because it wasn’t very good.
The tagline’s promise…
Depending on your outlook, the financial services industry is either an incredibly scary or extremely exciting place to be right now. More than any other industry, financial services companies are facing a paradigm shift brought on by the perfect storm of digitalization, increased regulatory scrutiny and changing demographic profiles and preferences of both clients and…
We recently partnered with a fast-growing data analytics company. It had successfully leapfrogged larger, more established competitors by providing hand-on, high-touch, over-the-top customer service. Branding around this level of service was a no-brainer, right? Well, maybe not. The company was preparing to go public. High-touch service is a…
Earlier this year, Harvard Business Review published an interesting report charting what millennials across the world want from work. Their hypothesis was that, to date, much of the research done on millennials has been skewed towards a more Western population. Their findings point to some key differences across cultures that hold important implications for employers…
If we had to sum up B2B branding in 2015, we would do it with one word: innovation. It has been a recurring theme in almost every one of our conversations with B2B companies in recent months. From the CMO to the CEO, B2B executives have been laser-focused on building brands that convey innovation…
Branding and Asset Management: Research Findings from desantisbreindel
How effective are asset managers in communicating a differentiated value proposition? What are the key drivers of the asset management brand? And what are the most effective channels for connecting with key audiences? These are some of the questions we set out to answer in the Brand…
Officially launching next week, the Brand Influence Guide for Asset Management (BIG:AM) aimed to understand how effective asset managers are in communicating a differentiated value proposition to the marketplace, and if, and how, firms are leveraging brand to connect with the audiences most critical to their success. We partnered with the Institutional Investor Institute…
We’ve written before about a common trap many challenger brands fall into: to compete with the Goliath in the industry, they feel the need to focus on the ways in which their offering is “just as good” as the big guys. In doing so, they sound defensive and inauthentic, often getting lost in the…
Marketers should never assume their clients or prospects are aware of all the products and services that fall under their corporate umbrella — even with those clients for which there are long-term, established relationships. By developing marketing and sales strategies that incorporate opportunities for clients to learn more about a company’s offerings, marketers can…
Earlier this year we helped a top-10 ETF firm launch an innovative new investment product. From the beginning, it was clear the firm’s leadership saw an ad campaign as the means to an effective launch. During our initial conversations, they wanted to jump right into creative concepts. That might have been the right…
Picture this. You’re sitting at your desk flipping through a small stack of mail. Most of it is publications, but there are a few direct mail letters, and one is from a bank. You recognize the name: they’ve just bought your business bank and you pass the building with the new, prominently displayed…