Beyond the Collateral Archives: September 2007
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September 27, 2007
Leveraging The Masters: What Financial Marketers Can Learn From Consumer Marketers
In this conversation with First American Funds distribution head Frank Wheeler, SwanDog Strategic Marketing Founder & Managing Principal Dave Swanson identifies three important ways that financial marketers can put “consumer-marketing” disciplines to work in the B2B space. The discussion draws from Frank’s many years at Procter & Gamble before entering the financial space. 15 minutes
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September 20, 2007
Financial Services Study Envisions a Comprehensive Role for Marketing
Asset management firms focus on the production of marketing collateral and a limited number of other functions to their detriment. That’s the conclusion of the 2007 Beyond The Collateral: Unlocking Marketing’s Potential for Strategic Advantage study co-authored by SwanDog Strategic Marketing and Financial Research Corporation (FRC).
The overwhelming majority of CEOs, senior executives and heads of distribution say they expect Marketing to have a greater impact on their businesses in the next five years. (Not surprisingly, marketing heads concur!)
Yet, the study suggests that firm management is underutilizing the potential of their marketing organizations, often viewing Marketing as just a supplement to the sales effort.
“This is not meant to be a direct indictment of Marketing,” write Dave Swanson, Founder & Managing Principal of SwanDog Strategic Marketing, and Mike Evans, President of FRC. “There is plenty of evidence that suggests, for the most part, Marketing has always done what they have been asked to do, an what they have been structurally designed to do, which is to primarily create and distribute marketing materials. Traditionally, Marketing has not been asked or expected to take a strategic role within their firms. This is evident in Marketing’s typical structure, responsibilities and funding.”
Our goal, with the study and in discussion continuing on the Beyond the Collateral.com Web site, is to engage the industry—senior management, distribution heads, marketing chieftains and their teams in the pursuit of what we’re calling Comprehensive Marketing. This is in contrast to the one-sided marketing that the study documents as the status quo in the industry today.
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September 20, 2007
Dave Swanson on Beyond the Collateral Study
Dave Swanson, Founder & Managing Principal of SwanDog Strategic Marketing, provides high-level comments on the SwanDog/FRC study Beyond the Collateral: Unlocking Marketing’s Strategic Potential for Competitive Advantage.
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September 15, 2007
What Brand Management Is and Isn’t
It’s not the advertising. It’s not a positioning statement. It’s not a tag line. Too many financial service firms don’t understand this. When we talk to firms regarding their “brand,” too often they immediately refer to their advertising or their firm’s positioning statement. They think that is where their brand resides, and that brand management is in the hands of the keeper/enforcer of the brand standards manual.
What too many fail to recognize is that a brand resides in the collective perceptions of their clients’ minds. It is the firm’s customers’ and prospects’ collective perceptions — of their products, their literature, their value-added programs, the sales reps who call on them, the phone reps who answers their calls–that all leave a lasting impression. This amalgamation of impressions leaves a strong overall perception of the firm. These perceptions are the firm’s real brand in the customers’ eyes, regardless of how close they match the positioning statement. And, once established, these perceptions are hard to change.
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September 13, 2007
Value-Added Programs Fall Short
Based on a recent Financial Research Corporation/Horsesmouth survey of 2,200 financial advisors, value-added programs are the most important access element with branch managers. Our study found that responsibility for value-added almost always falls within Marketing. But, we consider what’s being done by the industry as a whole “a big brand miss.”
How much longer can financial services distributors be expected put up with the free “value-added” training programs offered up by asset managers? If it were up to me, I wouldn’t defer critical training of my FAs to some of these second rate efforts.
For the record, I’m not against manufacturers delivering programs, I’d just like to see some efficacy. Most of these programs are little more than ‘edutainment’ that live three steps removed from the real subject matter expert. In other words, the people who understand the content aren’t the same people delivering it.
Imagine a pharmaceutical wholesaler standing in front of a room of doctors talking about a new spinal fusion procedure. “So how do you do that?” asks the surgeon. “Er, you glue the big one to the little one above it. You want to use really strong glue.”
For marketers, the call to action is step in and upgrade your content. Or at a minimum, connect your program to your brand! Successful value-added programs effectively extend the brand promise.
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September 12, 2007
Free Tools Help Measure Web Site Popularity
How do you know if your company’s Web site is competitive? Many firms announce rankings periodically, and the Mutual Fund Education Alliance bestows a few awards every year. While those assessments are qualitative, a few free Web tools make it possible to measure a site’s relative standing.
We’ve modeled the following table on the approach used by eBizMBA (see 25 Most Popular Business Sites as an example). And, we used the top mutual fund Web sites as identified by Alexa.com excluding the Singapore-based Fundsupermart.com and UK-based TrustNet Limited.
eBizMBA’s model considers three sources in measuring “top sites:”
- Inbound links, which are key to search engines discovering a site. Links from other Web sites serve to validate the expertness of a Web site. The source used in the table is Yahoo’s Site Explorer (Yahoo login required).
- Monthly visitors as counted by Compete.com. Compete “triangulates” multiple data sources, including ISP, Panel & Toolbar to estimate U.S. traffic.
- Monthly visitors as counted by Quantcast.com. Quantcast says it observes “anonymous records of visits to internet destinations. For a portion of the observations, they have certain information, such as the age, gender or income level of the Internet visitor and/or their household. This group is called a panel and forms one aspect of our analysis and reporting methodology.” Internet log records are also analyzed.
- Alexa rank, which is a blend based on a combined measure of page views and users (reach).
