Marketing in the Coronavirus Crisis: Notes from a Discussion at the Boston Meeting of the Gramercy Institute

March 20, 2020

Just before everything shut down in the face of the pandeminc, a group of financial marketers convened in Boston for a meeting of the Gramercy Institute. The session was billed as focusing on the topic of ”What’s New and What’s Next in Financial Marketing“ and indeed much of the content touched on the future, but, taking a cue from the news at the time, the host initiated a discussion of marketing in a crisis.

Broadly, the conversation fell into two buckets: communication “best practices” and the role of marketing. Two key take-aways:

Communication “best practices.” There was agreement that transparency and authenticity were key to building connections with customers, but also that there was no clear playbook for communication frequency and channel. Discussion participants recognized the need to respect the limited time and frayed nerves of customers but also saw potential value in providing clear guidance in an environment filled with uncertainty. Likewise, they recognized the need to find a balance between communication overload – exacerbated by the worldwide turn to digital communications in light of severe restrictions on face-to-face contact – and the value of demonstrating presence and building community when so much of the current crisis feels (and is) isolating. Finally, participants expressed mixed feelings about finding opportunities in the crisis. Many said that this was definitely not the right time to be promoting products. Some made the argument that people are looking for concrete assistance and that there was a place for tasteful promotion of solutions that could meet the needs of customers in the current environment.

Role of marketing. As the discussion turned to the role of marketing amidst the crisis, there was widespread consensus that in some ways the environment was one in which marketing could really prove its value in building relationships with customers and prospects and in delivering timely, conscientious, clear communications. Even more, though, there was agreement that marketers at B2B financial services companies should seize on this as a chance to forge a closer partnership with their sales colleagues, who are likely to be struggling to adjust to a world in which face-to-face contact is minimized or even completely foregone. Everyone agreed that if Marketing could find a way to enable sales to leverage digital and voice channels to nurture relationships at a distance and at scale, it would have a significant impact on the ability of the company to navigate these difficult times.

While the event was likely the last in-person meeting for the near future for most in attendance, it was a valuable opportunity to share ideas with colleagues and learn from each other as chaos seemed to be descending. It has given us much to think about as we all now hunker down, socially isolate to try to stay safe, and think about what the future might hold in store.

Resistance is Mutable: 5 Keys to Driving Technology Adoption in Financial Services

February 26, 2020

Technology is continuing its push to take over all aspects of customer workflow in financial services, from paperless onboarding to risk assessment apps to instant loan decisioning to algorithm-based portfolio construction. In fact, there are few aspects of the customer lifecycle that can’t be touched by technology. But “can’t be” is different from “won’t be” and that distinction often comes down to adoption by customer-facing personnel. While few technologies are perfect and there’s often a specter of tech replacing humans, in our experience neither of these is typically the cause of tech adoption struggles. More often than not, tepid adoption is due to a failure to appreciate the intensity of people’s resistance to change.

You may think that the current system is so inefficient/ineffective/clunky that everyone will love the new one, but that is not the case. Why? For starters, nobody likes to be told what to do. Moreover, even when people work with far-from-perfect systems and processes, they don’t always embrace the new, required solution because they have devised work-arounds that have become an integral – if imperfect – part of their routine. Finally, for customer-facing personnel, you can take whatever resistance exists and multiply it by 10 because those on the front lines of customer interactions are understandably anxious about using systems they don’t know and trust when under the pressure of dealing with customers looking for quick resolutions to their problems.

To overcome these obstacles and drive long-term adoption, here are five key components for success:

Understand the audience. When you want to figure out how to get customers to buy, you seek out research and information about their attitudes, behaviors, and pain points to identify points of leverage. Driving adoption is no different. Sitting with, talking to, and watching future users in action will fundamentally shape how you should present the new technology to them and how you can communicate its value more persuasively.
Appreciate their anxiety. Change is hard. As the saying goes, “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.” Dismissing or underestimating the anxiety surrounding technology change is practically a guarantee that you will underinvest in driving adoption and will fall short of your goals.
Calculate the impact. How much time saved? How much more accurate? And, most importantly, how do those gains translate into benefits to the users and their work? Most change management efforts come equipped with an ROI calculation, but these calculations are often based on a hypothetical future state, rather than the users’ current state. Identifying the time spent on activities today and the potential value of that time redeployed will lead to more compelling adoption communications grounded in reality.
Market the change. Driving adoption means influencing behavior. Influencing behavior is the primary job of marketing (albeit one that typically applied to prospects). The same core elements of a successful marketing campaign – nailing the message, identifying the most effective communication channels, and measuring results – should be applied to your adoption efforts with all the rigor and discipline of a lead generation or customer retention campaign.
It’s a marathon not a sprint. If you were launching a new product to a skeptical market, you wouldn’t promote it once at launch and then never again. Driving tech adoption must be approached the same way. It’s fine to launch with a splash, but if that isn’t supported by ongoing efforts to highlight successes, handle ongoing objections, and measure effectiveness, the opportunity for wide-spread adoption will be missed.

If these five components make driving technology adoption sound like a marketing campaign, that’s because it is. Many businesses talk about “selling” users on new technology but miss the most important inference of this language: before selling, you need marketing. A company may not get as excited about 95% adoption as it does about big, new sales deals, but the amount of money invested in new technology means that it should. A great but unused application has as much value to the company as a big but unsigned customer: None.

Notes from FinTech Connect 2019: Data Security Has Value, But Isn’t a Value Prop

December 31, 2018

“Making convenience secure”
“Protect your applications”
“Protect and grow your business confidently”
“Prevents the threat of breaches”

Anyone walking the aisles at the recent FinTech Connect conference in London reading the taglines displayed in the booths would have gotten a clear sense of the overwhelming significance of security in the FinTech space. Not that it should come as a surprise given the constant threat of crippling breaches and compromised data.

What is interesting about the threat and the proclamations of powerful counter-measures is that while the threat hangs like a cloud over the industry, the potency of security efforts effectively require a leap of faith. Just because an application hasn’t been compromised doesn’t mean it can’t be. And when the risk calculation includes the potential damage from a reported breach, even the smallest possibility looms large.

Moreover, the proof of an application’s security lies in the absence of problems. From a marketing perspective, that is a proposition that is very difficult to communicate: part of the customer value you’re delivering is a lack-of-disasters. And a lack-of-disasters is only a differentiating attribute if your competitors have all experienced breaches. In fact, then, data security is table stakes—vital, but not the thing on which you want to hang your positioning hat.

So if data security is important, but is impossible to prove or leverage as a differentiator…

Is there still a way to claim some ownership of it as an attribute?
Can you create value around an attribute for which nothing happening is a positive outcome?

The answer to both questions is “yes, through content marketing.” Developing and distributing a consistent, relevant, and valuable stream of data security content for prospects and customers is a proven, powerful way to instill confidence and build stickiness. Demonstrating data security expertise through content marketing does infinitely more than a promissory tagline to establish a position of trustability in customers’ minds and reinforce perceived value.

When done well, content marketing can create loyalty even in the face of low switching costs because customers and prospects become hooked on the valuable material delivered and come to recognize you as a knowledgeable and indispensable partner. Moreover, while it’s easy for a competitor to copy tagline promises of data security, it’s much more difficult to duplicate an effective content marketing engine.