Financial service global expansion

Brand health

Our client is an international financial services company known for their elite rewards program and superior customer service.

Our client is represented by bank partners local to specific markets, often times with different brand perceptions. With varying levels of brand awareness, consideration, and associations, our client must vary their brand building strategies to support global expansion.

The Challenge

Our client was interested in gaining a firm understanding of their overall brand health within 3 specific markets. The client knew there was lower awareness of their brand in these markets, but wanted to understand their brand perception, as well as perceptions of the banks they partner within each market.

Our challenge was to determine where their focus should be within the brand funnel to improve overall brand health, refresh brand perceptions, and ultimately gain more customers.

Our approach

Savanta delivered a robust survey to 3 different markets to understand how the client’s brand measures up compared to competitors, in terms of the brand funnel, key brand metrics, and brand associations.

Given the client also partners with other banks, we also designed the study to give our client insights on how to position their brand as complimentary to their partner’s positioning.

While we did develop a master global survey, we localized certain variables to ensure the insights we provided were valid, improve a strong understanding of the landscape, and determine any key disparities by market.

The outcome

Savanta’s research gave the client tactical and strategic guidance to build their brand. Tactically, we learned that first, the client must build their lower awareness and familiarity to bring up key brand metrics like relevance and affinity. Strategically, we developed a framework to identify opportunities for strengthening brand associations (categorizing associations into four groups: essential, nascent, superficial, and low) which showed the client that by building on their essential associations they can grow into more desired, nascent associations.

We also learned that in most markets there were wide gaps between customers and non-customers’ associations of the brand and identified an opportunity to develop a brand ambassador program to build positive brand associations.