A Kindred Conversation with Laura Barger | Financial Health Network’s CMO on moving beyond purpose-washing to improve Americans' financial health

This article is a transcript of Laura and Nina’s exclusive conversation for Kindred members. It has been edited for clarity. Kindred is the membership built to support leaders building socially responsible businesses. Kindred membership provides organizations and leaders with access to the education, leadership development, and community of peers they need to confidently navigate increasingly complex environmental, social, and governance (ESG) decisions.?

Nina: Laura, hello! So glad you could join us. You've worked across such a broad range of companies, including Virgin Mobile, American Express, BNY Mellon, and now Financial Health Network. To get us started, can you trace the through line of your career so far?

Laura: First of all, thank you Nina. I’m really excited to be here, this should be fun! Looking back at the trajectory of my career, my roles have all centered around marketing services and capabilities for underserved populations.?

This trajectory started at Virgin Mobile, as you mentioned. What really drew me to that role was that the company was bringing prepaid phones to the United States in a way that they were not previously marketed. Prepaid phones were traditionally considered a throwaway phone or a kind of a low-income option, but what we saw at the organization was an opportunity to provide a much-needed service to previously ignored and underserved populations. Many of these customers didn’t have credit or had thin credit, or they were young and looking for a phone option that worked for them.?

Similarly at American Express, we were looking at prepaid options for audiences that were previously overlooked by financial services. And now, at Financial Health Network, we bring together companies, fintechs, researchers, nonprofits, policy makers, and innovators to design and implement solutions that improve financial health for all people. So again, highly focused on serving underserved populations and folks that otherwise are rarely offered products or services designed for their needs.?

Where marketing comes in, and where my curiosity and passion lie, is figuring out how to market these much needed services with dignity. These are not populations that need pity or a throwaway type of product. They are spending money, they are aware of money, they are working populations. So, I think what's really driven me over the years has been the question of how can I bring a really formal and sophisticated marketing approach that treats these audiences with dignity. How do we build brands that make these products accessible and in a way that creates a mainstream acceptance??

As industries continue to build around providing access and equitable opportunity to people, it just becomes a bigger and bigger opportunity for marketers who are looking to combine social good and impact with real business success and growth.

Nina: You mentioned you’re currently at Financial Health Network. Given the ‘network’ approach of the organization, I’d imagine your work puts you in contact with a broad range of CMOs—from those at the helm of fintechs to those running nonprofits. Are there any shifts you’re spotting across these marketing leaders and how they take up the CMO role?

Laura: Absolutely, the role is changing significantly. A decade or even a generation ago, the CMO was part of the C-suite but still considered a service part of the organization and maybe even slightly reactive to core strategy. But I think that a lot of things that the CMO has always found important—thinking about the role of brand messaging, about growth, and about our employer brand, for example—all of those types of things are not just a side part of an organizational strategy. They are starting to drive organizational strategy and so you now see CMOs sitting at the very highest levels of organizations helping drive significant strategy decisions.?

I think the second big thing I’ve observed about the CMO role is that this person is often one of the most vocal and enthusiastic adopters of the idea that social impact and business impact can go hand in hand. There is not a gap anymore between how a business sees its success and what it's doing to further key messages or strategies around social impact. It’s been incredible in my role to work with a network of CMOs and their organizations who think like this, and I think it's starting to take hold and make a real impact in the industry.

Nina: To your last point, people tend to react negatively when we talk about social impact and marketing because we’ve seen empty purpose-washing take over brand communications. How do you avoid this in the way you bring social impact initiatives into the marketing organization?

Laura: Yes, that's a great question and it's always a risk. I think there are a few key aspects or elements to make sure that marketing and social impact are an integrated part of an organization and not just purpose-washing or a halo effect.?

First, marketing needs to be able to feed into strategic and product decisions. If you think about it, marketing is on the front lines right. We are the ones receiving a lot of information from the market and employees, and so it can be the first recipient of a lot of ground swell of need and desire and reaction to the brand. If through your marketing team you're hearing and then able to respond to the needs of your consumers, your customers, new employees, etc., it is an organic way to make sure that you're not purpose-washing. This is because marketing is not just dreaming up messaging. It's literally responding to an external voice.?

The second key part of it, and a huge part of what we do at the Financial Health Network, is encouraging organizations to actually measure the impact of your social or purpose initiatives. You have to be able to back up what you say. It's not enough anymore to just announce an intention. You need to follow it up with real data and information on what it is that you're doing and what the outcomes look like.?

For us at Financial Health Network, this often means taking a really strong benchmark measurement of the state of consumer financial health. When you start to overlay product changes, policy changes, and benefits design—whatever it is you choose to do to improve financial outcomes—the key is to then go back and measure it against the benchmark. Did your decisions actually change outcomes? And then communicate! This information should not be considered under lock and key. If something is working to drive impact, open source it!?

Nina: You’ve primarily worked with underserved populations, whether through roles at for profit or nonprofit organizations. In the design community I’m part of, there is a big conversation about how you design with and learn from these customers in a way that addresses the power dynamic elephant in the room. Are there any lessons you’ve learned around this?

Laura: That's a really good question. I feel like it's an evolving practice but no matter what, just because the people we serve happen to sit in a particular population, it doesn't mean that there is a one size fits all right solution. One of the first lessons is the need for continuous listening and to make sure that you're not falling prey to certain hypotheses or generalizations.

One favorite stories related to this: we were listening to some research from a couple of other organizations and I remember someone saying, “Well the key to financial health is financial literacy,"?or teaching people how to manage their money. And I remember someone from my organization stood up and said that hypothesis is really damaging because in all of our listening, people who live with low to moderate income know where every single penny they have goes every day. They are actually 100% literate about their finances. Instead, this colleague posed that the key to financial health requires systemic change and removing systemic barriers, or things that these populations don't have direct control over. So, in some ways, financial literacy just scratched the surface of a bigger need.?

Another thing which we’ve touched on in several of our previous conversations Nina is that it’s also important to understand where your limits are when trying to understand or engage underserved populations. The key here is partnerships. One of the things I love about being at the Financial Health Network is that we know what we have access to and what our strengths are, but we also know that there are hundreds of community organizations or other nonprofits that are really contextual to people’s lives. So, finding ways to partner with those organizations to help you really see people in 3-D, I think is a mark of a really sophisticated, forward-thinking organization.

Nina: You've spent the last six years helping bring the idea of financial health into mainstream industry conversation. What are some of the moonshot ambitions you have for the idea in the next six years??

Laura: Oh, my gosh how much time do we have? There's a million things! When we started out at Financial Health Network, financial health as a term was very niche. It was still kind of based on whether somebody had access to financial services or not—an unbanked versus banked dichotomy. We are now seeing financial health being seen and accepted and defined much more broadly, with many more people seeing themselves as stakeholders in financial health than there were even five years ago.

I would love for every leader in every industry to understand their role in financial health. Whether it's as an employer, whether it's as a vendor of products or services, or whether it's someone who is making the rules, like setting policy and thinking about the financial system at a systems level. So, a real moonshot would be to have everyone see their job description as having a role in financial health.?

A second moonshot is more at the systems level. When we think about business success and the metrics by which we look at the health of our economy, we are still basing our ratings and thinking around some pretty old metrics. We still look at the GDP and Fed data and stocks to talk about the health of just the economy. Those to me feel like only a small portion of how we can really look at the health of our people and the health of our economy. We are pushing hard to have financial health become a more broadly accepted metric. If you are really looking at how a country is fairing in terms of economic health, you should be looking at the financial health of its population.?

How do you do that? Measurement: adopting a set of metrics that are consistent and that are standardized. When you're thinking about your corporate KPIs every year it's pretty rare to have someone come out and say, among our top five, sitting right next to our shareholder value, is how our employees are doing. Are they financially healthy? How are our customers doing? Are they financially healthy? That doesn't feel as prominent as it could be, and so a real moonshot would be to start seeing financial health show up as corporate enterprise KPIs. I would consider that to be a huge success.

Laura Barger is the Financial Health Network’s Chief Marketing Officer, leading the Marketing and Communications teams. She oversees strategic initiatives – from events to content development to digital strategy– with the goal of telling the Financial Health Network story through the lens of both positive impact and progress. Laura is deeply committed to the idea that finance should be a force for good, believing that consumer financial health is an absolutely critical component of a healthy American economy.? She is a champion of marketing innovation and has a passion for creating memorable experiences for both the organizations and people who interact with the Financial Health Network.

Laura has over 20 years of marketing experience both in consumer and corporate organizations, gaining distinction in her successful transformation of marketing organizations. She encourages teams to adopt innovative digital marketing practices, leverage data to maximize marketing efficiency, and experiment with cutting-edge communications methods.

Laura holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Colby College. She resides in Maine with her kids, Rowan and Mira, and shepherd pup, Aidy.