You’ve got big ideas and big promises….but can you prove you can be trusted?
Financial Marketing was a busy place during lockdown. Like you, we made calls to clients and suppliers to see how we could help, watched the news, watched our cash, hoped for the best and prepared for the worst.
We cannot express how grateful and humbled we were by the kindness of our clients and friends in business and how thankful we are that we are OK. In fact, better than OK. We grew in lockdown, both as a business and in our thinking.
During our time in domestic incarceration we reached out to anybody that needed help and started free marketing action learning sessions at 3pm every Thursday.
One recurrent seam of questions focused on what qualities businesses would need to have in whatever business environment was going to emerge. The answer that kept on surfacing was the need to be trusted. Now, that is just plain common sense isn’t it? Or is it? How much of our marketing thinking has this outcome at its core? And how on earth do you create competitive advantage on something as fragile and ephemeral as trust?
Financial Services brands that endure and thrive generally have the fact that they are trusted as a core quality. This doesn’t happen by accident. Simply put, it is the sum of a thousand gestures between people and it can be planned.
Trust is built upon the bedrock of customer centric behaviours. Marketing communications plays a pivotal role in connecting these customer centric behaviours to the world in order to allow trust to grow.
From our discussions, it was clear that a marketing routemap of how to engender trust could be a very useful tool for us and our clients. So, we set to work. Here’s how we thought it through.
Businesses that are sustainably competitive are trusted organisations. Decisions are made within the framework of having a PURPOSE beyond sheer profit maximisation. Therefore, let’s give marketing a framework to ensure that it plays its part in ensuring that the companies’ stakeholder groups can see with their own eyes that the business’ behaviours can be rewarded with their trust.
Investing in this enduring challenge creates sustainable competitive advantage. FM’s PURPOSE framework is designed to help businesses plan marketing communications that engender trust.
Like every good marketer, we started with an acrostic:
People matter. Engage with all stakeholders to create better customer outcomes;
Understanding customers and markets requires constant focus and investment;
Real outperforms fake every time. Be authentic in every way and at every level;
Promote with emotional intelligence;
Organise your business to be agile. Success comes from being ready to change;
Social connection is not a project. It is part of the fabric of business;
Easy money is not sustainable. You have to be driven by more than just profit.
We then mapped this acrostic into marketing performance indicators and created a gap analysis.
We have road tested the model on some projects over the last couple of months and it has proved to be simple in concept, sophisticated in analysis and clear in findings.
We would be very interested in sharing our thinking with you and for you to see whether our framework can help you in perhaps some of the biggest business planning challenges in our lifetimes.
Keep safe and well.