Personas That Work: Building Around Real Psychological Needs, Not Demographics
Let’s be honest: Most financial services brands still build personas based on demographics or outdated assumptions. Labels like “Millennial,” “Affluent,” or “High-Value” might seem useful, but they often miss the mark on what truly drives customer behavior. At Shiny, we see this disconnect regularly. Clients come to us with personas that don’t reflect the current …
What Financial Brands Can Learn From Brands Like Netflix and Amazon
Here’s the trap: you benchmark your digital experience against other banks as a best practice, right? That might tell you what your peers are doing. But it won’t tell you what your customers expect. They’re not spending all day comparing bank apps. They’re living in the worlds of brands like Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, YouTube—brands that have …
Stakeholder Interviews – Challenging Internal Silos
Before we write a Responsive Brief for our financial services clients, we listen. Not to the customer—yet—but to the key stakeholders inside the business. Because no matter how aligned a company thinks it is, there are always invisible silos, assumptions, and internal truths that muddy the water when trying to get to work that drives …
Defining Your Real Enemy with a Responsive Brief
In financial services, you don’t lose customers to better brands. You lose them to inertia. It’s not the competitor who wins the day. It’s the back button. It’s the half-finished form. It’s the customer who decided to think about it later and never came back. That’s the real enemy. And if you don’t name it …
Meeting customers where they are: Channel of choice matters.
April is Financial Literacy Month. As experts in marketing financial services, we’re big believers in financial services brands having an obligation to help its customers first and foremost. And ultimately, that help should yield financial literacy in some small or large way. But like all service-oriented brands, there is no one-size fits all when it …
Meeting customers where they are: Do you assume your new customers know how to use a credit card?
April is Financial Literacy Month. As experts in marketing financial services, we’re big believers in financial services brands having an obligation to help its customers first and foremost. And ultimately, that help should yield financial literacy in some small or large way. But like all service-oriented brands, there is no one-size fits all when it …
Why is Financial Services underserving an audience worth billions?
Here’s an interesting situation: financial services companies largely ignore a well-funded audience that has an incredible long-term entrepreneurial track record, all because this audience didn’t grow up under the US financial structure. I’m talking about a group of which I am a member, namely international students in particular, and immigrants in general. International students bring …
What happened to the metaverse?
Recently I hosted an internal meeting about the current state of “the metaverse”, “VR/AR tech”, etc., and how it seems to be all talk and no substance. It’s been about a year since Zuckerberg changed the company name from Facebook to Meta, and what do they have to show for it? Well, other than finally …
Three ways financial services companies can win Gen Z's loyalty
Gen Z is keeping me up at night. As a mother of two Gen Z kids, I sometimes find myself awake at night ruminating about my children being in a position to make wise use of their income and having the discipline and diligence to save for their future. As a marketer, I sometimes find …
Fintech brands aren’t stealing customers from big financial brands. Big financial brands are giving their customers away.
Looking for a painful experience? Try opening savings accounts with large banks. Afterward you’ll realize just why fintechs are such a competitive threat to large established brands. Our Big Bank Test We were doing a research project for one of our financial clients and decided to open savings accounts with different brands to better understand …
Help.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the word ‘help’ these days. We recently delivered a strategy presentation to one of our financial services clients and the word probably came up hundreds of times. Literally. Financial services is a complicated business. No matter what part of the space your business plays in, help is literally the …
Brands should think like a 7 year old.
Brands should think like Corn Kid. I don’t mean all brands should be jumping on the latest trends to try and make hay with whatever clip/meme/story is capturing the public’s interest (though that’s not a bad thing to do for many brands.) What I mean is that brands should embrace the inherent positivity and joy …
Why I hate "employees"
I hate employees. And I feel like I can never escape them. I was recently at dinner with friends, and someone asked me, “How many employees do you have?” Earlier that day, I had to answer the same question a couple of different times, once for a survey and again for a site registration. Each …
The rise of social shopping
Many years ago, I was part of a team who had an opportunity to revolutionalize e-commerce through leveraging social influencers. But we didn’t, because we were too focused on efficiency and less interested in experience. Here’s the set up: back in the early days of digital marketing I was part of a team that created …
What's your brand's time to value?
We frequently talk to our financial services clients about time to value. The concept of time to value is fairly simple. What is the elapsed time between when a customer makes a decision to purchase/apply/engage with your brand and when the customer receives value from your brand? If you want to keep the competition behind …
Improve your Zoom by zooming out
There are five levels of self-awareness. Zoom makes the fifth absolutely painful. But luckily, there is a solution. Researchers have defined the levels of awareness by using a mirror and seeing how babies and others react to it. The research shows there are distinct stages of awareness: that’s a mirror (Level 1); there’s a person …
Four fintech imperatives for established brands
Plaid recently released its second annual report on fintech usage, dubbed The Fintech Effect: Fintech’s Mass Adoption Moment. Plaid defines fintech as “…any digital service that a consumer engages with in order to manage their money, including online banking, payments, investing, savings, budgeting, borrowing, and goal-setting.” So, the study is really about customer adoption of …
Back to the Future
The question many people are asking right now is, “what is the role of an office?” This question feels urgent and recent but reality is that the advertising community (at least) has been wondering the same thing for over 20 years, when Jay Chiat created what was then called “the virtual office.” In 2000 Chiat …
When reality is too real for its own good.
Ever wonder if all those characters used in insurance marketing work? Ad Age did some research recently on the most liked and remembered ad insurance spokes-characters. The rankings* themselves didn’t really interest me as much as this sentence from the article: “According to the poll, one reason they (spokes-characters) work is that they make intangible …
Why does everything look and act the same?
I kept coming back to that question as I re-read the Accenture Fjords Digital Trends 2021 report. In it they shared an overall theme about the need for businesses to map out new territory in the digital arena. The central idea is that the people who create digital experiences have relied too heavily on tried-and-true …
What Financial Brands Can Learn From Brands Like Netflix and Amazon
Here’s the trap: you benchmark your digital experience against other banks as a best practice, right? That might tell you what your peers are doing. But it won’t tell you what your customers expect. They’re not spending all day comparing bank apps. They’re living in the worlds of brands like Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, YouTube—brands that have …
Defining Your Real Enemy with a Responsive Brief
In financial services, you don’t lose customers to better brands. You lose them to inertia. It’s not the competitor who wins the day. It’s the back button. It’s the half-finished form. It’s the customer who decided to think about it later and never came back. That’s the real enemy. And if you don’t name it …
Meeting customers where they are: Do you assume your new customers know how to use a credit card?
April is Financial Literacy Month. As experts in marketing financial services, we’re big believers in financial services brands having an obligation to help its customers first and foremost. And ultimately, that help should yield financial literacy in some small or large way. But like all service-oriented brands, there is no one-size fits all when it …
What happened to the metaverse?
Recently I hosted an internal meeting about the current state of “the metaverse”, “VR/AR tech”, etc., and how it seems to be all talk and no substance. It’s been about a year since Zuckerberg changed the company name from Facebook to Meta, and what do they have to show for it? Well, other than finally …
Fintech brands aren’t stealing customers from big financial brands. Big financial brands are giving their customers away.
Looking for a painful experience? Try opening savings accounts with large banks. Afterward you’ll realize just why fintechs are such a competitive threat to large established brands. Our Big Bank Test We were doing a research project for one of our financial clients and decided to open savings accounts with different brands to better understand …
Brands should think like a 7 year old.
Brands should think like Corn Kid. I don’t mean all brands should be jumping on the latest trends to try and make hay with whatever clip/meme/story is capturing the public’s interest (though that’s not a bad thing to do for many brands.) What I mean is that brands should embrace the inherent positivity and joy …
The rise of social shopping
Many years ago, I was part of a team who had an opportunity to revolutionalize e-commerce through leveraging social influencers. But we didn’t, because we were too focused on efficiency and less interested in experience. Here’s the set up: back in the early days of digital marketing I was part of a team that created …
Improve your Zoom by zooming out
There are five levels of self-awareness. Zoom makes the fifth absolutely painful. But luckily, there is a solution. Researchers have defined the levels of awareness by using a mirror and seeing how babies and others react to it. The research shows there are distinct stages of awareness: that’s a mirror (Level 1); there’s a person …
Back to the Future
The question many people are asking right now is, “what is the role of an office?” This question feels urgent and recent but reality is that the advertising community (at least) has been wondering the same thing for over 20 years, when Jay Chiat created what was then called “the virtual office.” In 2000 Chiat …
Why does everything look and act the same?
I kept coming back to that question as I re-read the Accenture Fjords Digital Trends 2021 report. In it they shared an overall theme about the need for businesses to map out new territory in the digital arena. The central idea is that the people who create digital experiences have relied too heavily on tried-and-true …
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