The Halo Effect Unveiled: How a Bank Boosted Brand Equity by + 6pts
CUSTOMER CHALLENGE
In the competitive banking landscape, where reputation and trust are critical determinants of customer choice, the Head of Global Branding at a leading U.S. financial institution serving over 200 million customer accounts and wielding an annual marketing budget of more than $100 million, faced the significant challenge of quantifying the impact of marketing initiatives on brand equity—a key predictor of future account openings. The exceptionally long purchase cycle in financial institutions makes attributing success to top of funnel activities even more difficult.
SOLUTION & INSIGHT
To address this, the bank deployed Marketing Evolution to gain a baseline understanding of the influence of marketing activities on typically harder-to-attribute brand affinity metrics such as Reputation and Preference, and insights into how to allocate its budget across various products and communication channels to drive sustainable growth.
Marketing Evolution's analysis spanned the entire customer journey, revealing how interactions with both brand-level and product-specific campaigns contributed to the conversion process. This included assessing the impact and efficiency of each engagement along the customer's path.
The initial insights were revealing: the bank identified a significant halo effect where investments in advertising for one product positively influenced customer perceptions and the performance of other products within the same brand, thus enhancing the overall brand value. The findings also showed that digital channels were more effective in boosting brand equity than traditional TV advertising.
By anchoring investment decisions in their potential to leverage halo effects and amplify portfolio-level impacts, the client optimized budgets and significantly boosted marketing performance:
+ 6pts uplift in brand equity
in Reputation, which was initially in the 60s, and in Card and Bank Preference, both in the mid-30s
OUTCOMES
Armed with these insights and recommendations from Marketing Evolution, the company shifted towards a digital-first strategy, reallocating funds from traditional TV to Digital Video and Connected TV to bolster the brand's presence across all divisions. Further to this, they initiated a more nuanced approach to media spend distribution among Card, Bank, and Brand initiatives to more effectively engage customers at different stages of the marketing funnel.
The bank implemented the suggested changes quarterly over a year and saw a 6-point total uplift in brand equity: in Reputation, which was initially in the 60s, and in Card and Bank Preference, both of which started in the mid-30s.
