Do you have a recognisable brand?

Australiais one of the largest managed funds markets in the world.

Competing dealerships and manufacturers have traditionally differentiated themselves on distribution points, personnel, investment performance, fees, product attributes or service.

Technology and weight of competition is making differentiation on these attributes harder and a fresh approach is required.

Brand is the new differentiator. Building a strong and credible brand locks differentiation into the consumer mind and cannot be replicated.

This is well understood by marketers of consumer products. Brand is being used more readily in the Australian personal investment market, but by manufacturers more so than planners.

Colonial First State and Perpetual are good examples, as are global players like ING, Rothschild and BT. These are excellent marketing organisations and are attuning consumers, intermediaries and investors towards competition based on brand.

And it’s not just fund managers. Master trust brands like navigator and Asgard have executed marketing campaigns direct to investors to build brand awareness and brand attitude.

Where are the financial planning brands? Probably the best-known brand is RetireInvest, a position the group has reached through the brand-building it did years ago.

Banks have been successful in financial planning/funds management because, in general, consumers have relationships with brands rather than with companies.

It is vital to recognise that your organisation’s brand is an important asset and must be managed accordingly. In the eyes of the consumer, it is the only asset that makes you sustainably different from your competitors.

But advertising, publicity and promotion alone are not enough. Two British academics, Leslie de Chernatony and Malcolm McDonald, wrote of service sector firms: “… the challenge firms face is ensuring their staff deliver the promises expected from the advertising ...”

This means you need to align your operation to ensure that the brand promise implicit in your advertising is turned into a cast-iron brand contract delivered, unfailingly, to the customer.

The technique of brand asset management is useful within this service industry. Failure to manage the brand as an asset leads to operating processes being disconnected from the brand promise. This in turn leads to increasing customer dissonance and a dilution of brand equity. Operations must also be aligned with communication objectives, because naturally enough, customers believe their personal experiences a lot more than they believe carefully crafted communication programs. This is an issue mainly for manufacturers, but planners should take note too.

Many firms, planners and manufacturers, do not have a crystal clear understanding of their brand promise. If they do, many do not manage their brand to ensure a consistent, positive customer experience across all touch points.

Some even seem to actively sabotage their brand promise through: condescending communication; imposing new fees for existing services; not doing what they say they’ll do; fobbing customer problems off to the product or platform provider; and overselling and under-delivering.

Customers are disillusioned each time an organisation breaks the brand promise. This disappointment builds up over time and slowly destroys brand credibility leading to brand switching and loss of market share. Customers behave this way because they exchange money for that brand promise, and they expect it to be kept.

Translating brand promise into ‘the way we do things around here’ will help build a consistent brand experience at each customer touch point. This consistency moves the brand promise towards a dependable brand contract that binds the investor, planner and manufacturer together through the keeping of mutual promises.

It has been suggested that branding is the preserve of the big budget dealerships. Not so. Branding is not just advertising, it is the expression of the brand promise. This can be shown in the way you do things — the way you layout and decorate your office, the way you present your plans, the frequency of your reviews, your stationery, business cards and so forth.

Everything about your business carries a message about the brand promise you are making. The smaller dealerships may in fact be at an advantage as they can be more flexible in choosing a service platform and business model that supports the brand promise they want to make.

Branding is an issue for individual planners, individual practices and for the profession. The personal investment advisory industry is maturing. The quality of planning and advice is improving, academic qualifications are increasing and, as a result, the historic commission-driven salesperson image is being washed out of the system. But it all takes time.

Effective branding and brand building can accelerate this process. To a degree, the branding and promotion of the CFP designation has helped at an industry level. The opportunity is there for dealerships to support this through their own brand promises.

The challenge for the financial planning industry is to package and brand for customers the total set of experiences they expect and are paying for. Competition and technology demand it.

The opportunities for planners and planning groups who develop effective branding and brand asset management strategies are huge. Why do you think the banks have latched onto the term, wealth management? Your customers think of your business as a brand. Do you?

Alasdair Billingham is aMelbourne-based consultant specialising in financialplanning and marketing.