Financial Services Marketing Insights

What we now call "marketing" began long before the name was coined. In the mid-1800s, taking a trip salesmen dressed "snake oil" and other tonics in elegant packaging and extolled their virtues to a gullible public. New marketing applications quickly multiplied in the belief that marketing could make lots of new things possible in essentially any business scenario. For more than a century, execution, experience and eventually technique have helped marketing progress from unrefined starts into today's advanced practices.

Consumer product companies have been the leaders in the marketing field and have actually taken the undisputed lead as the creators of marketing's finest practices. While advanced marketing strategies have spawned customer giants, most financial services companies needed to be dragged, kicking and yelling, into the period of sophisticated marketing.

The Advancing State of Financial Services Marketing

Financial services marketing has, however, developed rapidly over the last decade. As a result, the extremely nature of the marketing function in financial services firms is going through a significant modification as more attention is paid to marketing-driven procedures that affect the whole firm. Our observations suggest that the more progressive monetary services companies are currently going through a useful and intellectual shift that is requiring the reexamination of the role of marketing within their firms. Numerous have begun to recognize that financial marketing responsibilities include not only establishing the firm's mission declaration and key messages, however likewise defining its company focus, appropriate differentiation, competitive advantages and worth proposition.

At the same time, nevertheless, a number of monetary services marketing directors need to take part in long-lasting turf battles with other departments prior to they can implement worthwhile monetary marketing initiatives that will assist accelerate the accomplishment of business objectives. In many monetary companies, the relentless problem of differentiating monetary marketing from sales still stays mostly unsettled. In addition, some monetary services marketing directors must still get considerable management support just to preserve equilibrium and get the opportunity to achieve even restricted objectives.

Focusing on the Customer

Peter Drucker, a sage of the monetary marketing discipline, gone over client specified worth almost 50 years earlier. Throughout the last decade his principle of a customer-centric focus has actually entered into popular marketing literature and is now the directing principle of monetary marketing. Drucker's essential mandate that 'the client's interests should precede' can be summarized by the following declarations paraphrased from his substantial works: The only legitimate meaning of business purpose is to create a consumer. What the business thinks it is producing is not as important as what consumers believe they are purchasing; what clients consider to be value is definitive. Every company has only 2 fundamental functions: marketing and development. Marketing is your whole company as seen from the consumer's point of view.

While easy to articulate, customer-centric practices are difficult to execute in many financial services companies. Challenges consist of a prevailing product-push mentality, a concentrate on short-term success, under-investment in financial marketing activities, and the lack of solid market intelligence about the wants and needs of target audience. We believe, however, that in the future the most effective monetary services marketing companies will be those that make Drucker's concepts their own through extrapolation, adaptation and innovative application. As effective monetary marketing develops to a cross-functional, multi-disciplinary activity, effective companies will produce a culture of consumer orientation throughout the organization and include advocacy for customer welfare in all business decision-making.

With the financial services market presently going through a transformation, management's challenge is to offer the leadership to displace the status quo and develop a culture of opportunity. Early adaptors who apply the concept of "integrated marketing" on an organization-wide basis will not only develop a customer-orientated culture, however also produce opportunities for innovation, enhanced efficiency and incremental success.