The business problem
Our client, a leading financial services provider, tasked us to provide high-value, strategic insights for two markets separately. The project started with a pilot in Italy and had a subsequent second part in the UAE.
Our task
The main goal of the project was to gain a deeper and more granular understanding of brand awareness and brand loyalty, as well as benchmark the company against its main market competitors. Our study focused on:
- Identifying associations related to trading with financial instruments in an effective and cost-efficient manner
- Measuring brand equity and brand positioning
- Uncover usage triggers and blockers in the trading market
- Identifying the best communication channels
Our Solution
We fired our decade-long expertise in market research to collect impactful insights through interviews with the relevant customer groups. Through a variety of analytics, we excelled at providing detailed information on how the brand can gain its usage share, and defined usage barriers to give actionable recommendations on the steps that will help the brand overcome them. We completed the project with a detailed overview of the best communication channels used by customers so the brand can improve its overall marketing strategy and personalise the approach for each channel.
Our pilot study in Italy successfully delivered insights on ‘Top of Mind’ (TOM) brand awareness and awareness quality, brand usage and consideration, and user brand preference and usage funnel against top market players.
By analysing the data, we identified which competitors are most likely to attract switchers and potential acquisitions.
Key Project Success Metrics
- ‘Top of Mind’ (TOP) positioning: The brand was not among the first brands trades think of.
- The brand’s platform was not the one traders were the most experienced with but it posed an attractive opportunity.
- Performance-wise, the brand ranked 4th place against its competitors, lagging behind in all key indicators: awareness, consideration, and usage.
Business Impact
- The study gave granular insights on reasons of usage, such as value for money, broker’s reputation, innovative products & tools, as well as fast execution speed and large range of order types.
- The data highlighted the top reasons to stop trading on the platform, thus providing recommendations on how to improve the strategy to minimise the negative impact on the brand.
- We addressed key issues to improve satisfaction, including optmisation of internal processes and communicating characteristis of the brand, related to its trustworthiness.
- Another important discovery was that the word of mouth the brand generates lacks behind, expanding the opportunities for an improved marketing strategy to increase awareness against key market players.
A Look in the Future
The study proved easy to scale across other markets, currently considering improving their brand awareness strategy and communication channel mix. We launched a subsequent project in the UAE.
Based on the data and insights we’ve collected, the recommendations we gave focused on the marketing and communications aspect, as well as optimisation of internal processes and frontline staff trainings and expertise.
Project Trivia:
Industry: Financial services
Company Size: 1000 employees
Location: Switzerland
GemSeek Capabilities: Market Research
