Guiding marketing investment to support growth by balancing brand vs. activation activity

Background

A global bank’s marketing budget had been on the decline for a number of years, and it had fallen behind its competitors in several ‘brand power’ reports as a result. This had got the attention of the bank’s board of directors, which commissioned Gain Theory to make a recommendation about what it should invest in marketing to reverse the decline and help drive growth.

Solution

Gain Theory consultants developed a plan that included four key actions:

1. A comprehensive audit of the bank’s historical marketing activity to assess the extent of the decline
2. A benchmarking exercise, which leveraged third-party data, to assess the true state of the bank’s brand value versus its peers
3. A best-in-class guide to brand marketing to inform future strategy
4. Modeling against brand health and commercial KPIs to determine past marketing impact

The insights and results from these four analyses were synthesized to create a series of recommendations: forecasts of future commercial KPI trends under different marketing investment scenarios; a roadmap to supporting marketing over the next five years; guidance for more optimally balancing brand focus activity with activation activity.

Results

Our work unlocked £800m of incremental revenue with our client feeding back that the outputs we provided “have been met with strong feedback at the most senior levels internally”.