Case Study
The Challenge
Brand teams face increasing challenges when it comes to differentiating in tight, competitive, and often highly regulated markets.
The Goal
To help our clients achieve meaningful differentiation, we enhanced our approach to brand health, emphasizing relationship building and customer loyalty as key growth drivers.
Growth Outcome
We design a sophisticated brand health model focused on cultivating strong customer relationships.
This framework guides teams to position their brand around benefits that motivate and differentiate, aligning experiences and products with the brand promise, and identifying key opportunities for product and service optimization.
With these insights, teams can leverage their competitive identity to drive acquisitions, build loyalty, and increase profitability. The framework maximizes revenue potential and fosters long-term customer value. Unlike traditional sales funnel models, our process focuses on achieving brand resonance. Read more about our approach and development.
We tested our model in a challenging environment.
The Radius Brand Health Insights Framework uses a proprietary process to identify attributes such as salience, preference, and loyalty/connection. These attributes help plot a brand’s market position against its competitors. The framework also provides detailed insights into the best practices that influence each brand’s placement within the market hierarchy.
To see how our framework would perform, we put it to the test in the competitive Financial Services (FS) sector. Our self-funded research study filtered multi-sector data to evaluate nine diversified FS brands to test the rigor of our framework.
Step 1: Assessing brand salience, recognition, and emotional connection.
Using a proprietary method that included extensive Market Landscape research, examining brands within the market, and incorporating metrics from behavioral science and Advanced Analytics, we created Brand Health composite metrics and determined key drivers of brand health.
In the above, Brand Health Scores show clear differentiation among Financial Services providers. Analyses demonstrate unique positions and subsequent improvement initiatives for top, middle, and lower-scoring brands.
Step 2: Identify attributes and KPIs that influence performance.
Three brands were selected to create a custom summary.
We looked at a high, medium, and low scoring brand in each of the three categories to develop a custom diagnosis and summary.
Brands differ greatly in their performance across drivers. Customer-centric measures such as ease of reaching live representatives, easy to do business with, and customer service are primary drivers of overall brand health. We also included:
- Open and honest about company operations
- Offer good value for the money
- Exceptional customer service
- Great, user-friendly mobile app
- Respond quickly to problems or questions
Custom summaries uncovered key insights about performance and opportunities.
Step 3: Develop key activation strategies to achieve growth goals.
For each of the three brands examined, the Brand Health Insights Framework provided rich insights on KPIs and opportunities. With this knowledge, teams could reassess growth goals based on market opportunities and develop specific action plans to support their objectives. Analysis below provides an overview of the rich insights our framework delivers.
Note: Brand Health Score average is 100 for each of the following.
Brand 2
Brand Health Score: 119
Overall Rank: 2 out of 9
Key Insight: Maintaining current advantages and focusing on convenience and accessibility to attract new customers will drive growth. Stress value relative to costs to drive existing relationships.
Strengths: Brand 2 is the most salient brand in the market, based on the combination of brand awareness and brand familiarity.
Weaknesses: This brand enjoys strong resonance (likely driven by a large customer base), but preference among the market at large is muted due to more moderate perceptions of value (worth relative to costs/fees).
Opportunities: Brand 2 leads most significantly on perceptions relating to convenient locations, an easy-to-use mobile app, and a great online experience. However, the brand is only moderately perceived to use customer data responsibly.
Activation strategy: Consider loyalty programs, personalized offers, multi-product benefits, and a campaign on data integrity to build on core strengths.
Brand 5
Brand Health Score: 100
Rank: 5 out of 9
Key Insight: This brand has strong salience in the marketplace, but meaningful growth will hinge on improving perceptions to drive trial and deeper customer connection.
Strengths: Brand 5 is well known nationally, only lagging the 3 largest brands in terms of awareness and familiarity.
Weaknesses: Loyalty/connection is merely average for this brand, profiling more similarly with lesser-known brands. Brand imagery is weak across all critical brand associations. While it is perceived best on rates and fees, associations with several other dimensions such as product suite, technology, and value lag those of nearly all peers.
Opportunities: This brand has several areas where improvement could help. The brand is associated least often than any other brand with convenient locations, easy to reach reps, and excellent customer service. Deficiencies on these important customer care metrics will be barriers to customer acquisition and retention.
Activation strategy: Consider product and service improvements, targeted marcom campaigns, and better use of technology to demonstrate ability to meet customer needs without a wide branch network.
Brand 7
Brand Health Score: 90
Rank: 7 out of 9
Key Insight: This bank’s best-in-class customer experience will support diversification and expansion, and additional strengths can be leveraged to deeper product penetration and emotional connection with customers.
Strengths: Brand 7 is the least well known of the brands in the competitive set, on a national basis (lack of both awareness and familiarity), but those that do know the brand strongly prefer it. It is often a consumer’s favorite brand, and it receives high scores for value relative to cost. Brand 7 is strongly associated with several experiential imagery statements — again among those aware of the brand.
Weaknesses: Associations of Brand 7 with technology excellence and product depth are below average, likely suggesting the brand is seen as a strong deposit bank but less likely for a fuller suite of lending and investment needs.
Opportunities: Brand 7 excels in customer experience, positioning it for growth if it diversifies and expands its target market. Despite being the least known nationally, it is strongly preferred by those who are aware of it. Improving associations with technology and product depth can further enhance Brand 7’s standing.
Activation strategy: Explore products and services to add, or create stronger communication about existing services as a first step in gaining new customers or entering new markets.
Deep competitive insights light the path for development and growth.
The Radius Brand Health Insights Framework provides detailed insights into competitive strengths and weaknesses across key metrics that matter most in their competitive space. With the framework, brand teams can design action plans where they have the most opportunity to develop salience, preference, connection and loyalty in their space, driving growth by meeting customer needs with the right products and services while developing a stronger bond with customers by anticipating their needs and delivering on their brand promise.
Reach out to talk with us about the impact our framework can have on your growth outlook.
