With the financial services landscape continuously expanding and evolving, it’s incumbent upon insights professionals to provide their teams with information to help them successfully navigate these shifts. The lines have blurred, and companies such as Apple and Google that were once thought of as being in other categories are suddenly competitive threats to financial services firms. Couple this with the rise of FinTech, and the options for consumers are growing every day.
So, what can an insights professional bring to the organization to help their teams make sense of this situation and take meaningful action?
The lines have blurred, and companies such as Apple and Google that were once thought of as being in other categories are suddenly competitive threats to financial services firms. Couple this with the rise of FinTech, and the options for consumers are growing every day.”
To provide you with some thought starters that may be relevant to your needs we’ve outlined a few things our clients have done that you might find valuable:
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Identify opportunities for innovation.
Putting a Jobs-to-Be-Done lens on how consumers and professionals are achieving their financial goals and addressing their needs can help your team identify spaces where you can innovate and highlight opportunities to enhance or extend your current offerings.
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Take a customer-driven look at the market landscape.
By having your customers sort brands with product categories and needs you can get a fresh perspective on how they see you and your competitors lining up against each other. The outcome is a platform for better aligning your benefits, offerings, and positioning with the realities of the competitive dynamics you’re facing.
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Develop an ongoing “pulse” study to keep tabs on how the market is evolving.
A consistent assessment of customer trends will help you stay ahead of emerging patterns of behavior and marketplace requirements. This will include allowing you to guard against, and combat, competitive intrusion.
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Implement a broad churn analysis of the financial landscape.
By studying recent switchers in the market at large, including those that have left your brand, you can capture a more holistic understanding of what is driving people to move their business elsewhere. This will allow you to see how people are migrating away from “traditional” financial services brands and determine what it will take to strengthen your position against upstart competitors.
A consistent assessment of customer trends will help you stay ahead of emerging patterns of behavior and marketplace requirements.”
These four strategies reflect a subset of ideas that we’ve seen as being particularly effective at helping companies navigate changing competitive dynamics. There are many options at your disposal to help you develop a clearer view of customer needs, get ahead of emerging market trends, and identify growth opportunities to guide your stakeholders through this turbulent period.
Read a recent blog post on strengthening loyalty and engagement in a competitive financial services market.
We welcome the opportunity to discuss research strategies. Please contact us to schedule a conversation.
