Banking on Digital Growth (eBook)

The Strategic Marketing Manifesto to Transform Financial Brands

James Robert Lay (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2020 | 1. Auflage
280 Seiten
Lioncrest Publishing (Verlag)
978-1-5445-0770-5 (ISBN)

Infos

If you're part of a financial brand marketing, sales, or leadership team, you know the entire industry is in the midst of exponential change fueled by new technologies. Consumers now make purchase decisions long before they walk into a physical branch location, if they walk into a branch at all, while mobile banks, digital lenders, and fintechs have transformed traditional growth models rooted in legacy broadcast marketing and branch sales strategies. Up to this point you've only dabbled in digital marketing without a formal plan or strategy to guide you. Now you feel frustrated because you're not getting the results you hoped for. You're also confused about what you should do next. In Banking on Digital Growth, James Robert Lay unlocks the secrets of digital growth with a strategic marketing manifesto to transform financial brands. You'll gain clarity with a strategic blueprint framed around 12 key areas of focus that empower you to confidently generate 10X more loans and deposits while finally proving the value of marketing as a strategic growth leader-not a cost center.

Textauszug

Chapter One

1. We Will Learn from the Past to Escape the Present

It’s 2007. A man known for his jeans and black turtlenecks steps onto the stage and introduces his company’s new product: the iPhone.

This revolutionary piece of technology combined three different tools in one. Yes, it was a cellular phone, but like his earlier breakthrough, the iPod, it was also a music player—and most transformative of all, an internet communication device (as it was called at the time), with email, web browsing, and more.

The moment this man stepped on that stage, it changed forever the way we communicate with one another.

Communication is at the heart of marketing and sales—and is the key to the future of growth for any financial brand.

It was only a dozen years ago Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. Think of all the exponential changes we’ve experienced since that time. Not only has technology evolved at an exponential rate, but so have consumer expectations. Meanwhile, competition—to keep up with those technologies and the changing consumer demands around them—has gone through the roof.

Take, for example, the music industry. Certainly, there were changes already happening before 2007, but in retrospect, the iPhone might have been its death knell. Jobs’s innovation sped up the rate of change enormously and on a macro scale.

This pattern can be seen across industries.

The financial marketplace is being transformed and disrupted by changes in technology, consumer expectations, and the competition.

Digital Disruption

When any industry experiences disruption, as Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler share in their book Bold, a series of six events occurs. As the authors explain, “The Six Ds are a chain reaction of technological progression, a road map of rapid development that always leads to enormous upheaval and opportunity.”

I’d like to zoom in and focus on three of the six Ds: dematerialization, democratization, and demonetization.

Consider how the music industry has evolved from vinyl to eight-track to cassette to CD to MP3 and now streaming. Film followed a similar trajectory, from big reels to VHS to DVD to Netflix and so on.

Notice the shift from larger pieces of technology and media to smaller, and eventually to “nothing.” Or at least nothing tangible in the physical world. With each shift, the new technology and media becomes a standardized part of the culture, the operating norm in society—and now dematerialization has become the norm.

In banking, we’ve seen dematerialization play out on multiple fronts but primarily up to this point on the transactional side of banking. For example, consumers have moved away from going to a physical branch to deposit checks and complete other transactional tasks. Instead, they use their mobile device to deposit checks digitally through an app.

Even the very concept of a traditional check is going through the dematerialization process, as peer-to-peer payment apps grow in popularity to replace physical payments. If you have young kids like me, you think it’s great you can pay your babysitter with Zelle or Venmo or PayPal and don’t have to worry about writing a check (or, worse, having no cash on hand and racing to make that extra ATM stop on the way home!).

Understandably, the dematerialization process makes those who’ve built their entire careers around the physical world of branch sales and broadcast marketing feel confused, frustrated, and overwhelmed about digital growth. No longer can they see, touch, or feel the world around them.

It can be scary for people to see their physical world taken away from them before their very eyes. I get it: like everything, digital comes with the perceived good and the bad.

Which brings us to the second part of digital disruption, which is democratization.

Let’s go back to the example of the music industry. We know record labels and production houses used to control the entire process from front to back. They were the hitmakers and gatekeepers who pulled all the strings.

In contrast, we now have these digital platforms where total nobodies can strike a chord with a mass audience and become global pop stars. Certainly, without YouTube there would be no Justin Bieber. Whether that particular example resonates with you may depend on your musical taste, but he is just one example of many who have gained the capability to create and communicate directly with audiences through new technologies and distribution channels.

Likewise, we see streaming platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime democratizing the film world by offering diverse options to many niche audiences. These companies are not traditional production studios, but they are now making their own content—and using the power of digital to serve a wider market than the old-school Hollywood entertainment giants.

Finally, as it relates to banking, we see democratization in the rise of financial brands with a digital- or mobile-first business model. Fintechs and neobanks are popping up left and right and by the thousands, communicating directly with and creating value directly for niche market segments through digital and mobile technologies.

Whether in banking or entertainment, digital has given power to the people—the power to connect and communicate—at scale.

But again, not everyone thinks these changes are great, and where a lot of the discontent is felt is among those legacy brands who used to hold all the chips but are now being stripped of their power and control.

In particular, they are losing the power to control pricing and make money in the same way they always have. Demonetization, the third part of digital disruption, is a doozy. Record labels felt this pain in a big way. In the heyday of recorded music—I’m referring in this context to its modern era, at the peak of CD sales in the mid-’90s, before the bottom fell out—labels were raking it in, charging $15 to $20 per disc, with very low production costs. As it turns out, the consumer wanted only two or three songs on each release. But tough luck for them: the record companies controlled the pricing model and could do whatever they wished.

We all know what happened next. The rise of digital and broadband brought about a democratization of music, and this led to a radical shift in the industry’s power balance. Labels lost their ability to set prices. No longer could they, essentially, set the terms for how listeners received and paid for music. The disruption from digital technology swept away a lot of the money—or rather, the particular legacy revenue streams and structures—that had previously been taken for granted.

At first, when Napster came on the scene, some predicted this demonetization would be virtually absolute, that listeners were simply never going to pay for recorded music again. I was in high school at the time and (I say this without any pride) was highly allergic to paying for music. In fact, I remember how I would fiendishly download music back then. Nonstop: I’m talking 24/7. My parents would be outside my bedroom door late at night, telling me to go to sleep or reprimanding me for always making our household’s internet speed slow to a crawl.

But I wasn’t just downloading music for me. As a young entrepreneur in the making (or budding criminal, depending on your point of view), I saw the possibilities in the new technology. I was one of the first kids in my school to get a DSL internet connection (128 Kbps, which was twice the speed of dial-up) and a CD burner. I would burn fully customized discs from songs off Napster, then sell them the next day for $10 each.

The kids at school loved it. Instead of having to schlep down to Best Buy or Target and drop $15 to $20 to buy a CD with only two or three tracks they actually liked, now for half the price they could get from me twenty of the hottest jams of 1999.

Youthful indiscretions aside, I bring up the story because it shows how I took advantage as an individual of these three crucial elements in digital disruption: dematerialization, democratization, and demonetization.

Of course, today, there wouldn’t be the same appetite for those customized CDs. Nor, I would argue, is there the same consumer frustration. For the most part, we don’t feel like we’re being gouged anymore. We have much more say over how we want our personal entertainment dollar spent, and with streaming services we can pay $8 to $15 a month to unlock an entire library of music and movies.

What are you doing to take advantage of the dematerialization, democratization, and demonetization of banking?

Of course, demonetization, and...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 26.8.2020
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Marketing / Vertrieb
• ISBN-10: 1-5445-0770-4 / 1544507704
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5445-0770-5 / 9781544507705