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Welcome back to Marketing Monthly, the imaginatively named, once a month newsletter where we look at goings on in the world of broker marketing. This time around we look at that most nebulous of topics – branding. Enjoy…
A couple of things happened at the end of last year.
One was a conversation I had with someone, who had just moved from a major brand in the brokerage space to a still big – but not as big – broker.
They noted that they’d tried to replicate a partnership strategy they’d been using at their former company but it didn’t work. Why? Because their level of brand recognition was nowhere near as high.
The result was that it was (1) harder to find new partners and (2) more difficult for those partners to trust them. This was something they had simply never had to consider before.
The other thing was looking at app downloads after Trump’s election, in what many have described as one of the most underrated articles on TradeInformer in 2024.
For those that missed that piece, and as readers are probably aware, lots of people went to buy bitcoin after Trump’s election.
If you look at Switzerland specifically, the app that benefited most from that bump was Swissquote. But if you then look at what keywords people were using to find their app, the top search query was…’Swissquote’.
In other words, Swissquote has built up its brand to such a degree that someone wanting to buy bitcoin did not have to first go through the process of figuring out what company offers that service. They immediately associated buying bitcoin with Swissquote.
This is not as easy a position to be in as you might assume and it has become harder, almost entirely due to the internet.
Everyone knows the hackneyed expression about half of ad spend being wasted, you just don’t know which half. But one facet of our digital world is that you can capture – and therefore quantify – human actions in a way that simply wasn’t possible previously.
The result is that across almost every industry everyone is determined to be ‘data-driven’ and only invest where there is a clear and immediate payback. If you want to see the results of this then compare this 1980s Porsche ad…
With this contemporary piece of social media slop from the same company…
There is no real comparison – the 1980s photograph is a million times better and so is the copy.
Another facet of this is the fact that so much more content is now consumed and companies need to constantly update different channels as a result. The internet has also become an additional spending channel, rather than completely replacing other forms of media, meaning budgets are spread thinner. A deterioration in quality is a knock-on effect of that.
Nonetheless, the point remains that if you are in marketing today, it’s difficult to convince management that it’s worth investing in long-term branding, and the broker industry has not been immune from this.
“Branding is always an interesting challenge with brokers,” Maria Meramveliotaki, Brand & Strategy Director at Taurex, told TradeInformer. “The industry is heavily IB-driven, and most brokers are focused on quick wins.
“Branding, on the other hand, is more of a long-term game. It’s not exactly easy either. It takes consistency across everything—visuals, messaging, strategy—and often requires a bigger upfront investment. That’s why a lot of brokers shy away from it; they’re so focused on immediate acquisition metrics that branding doesn’t feel like a priority. But in the long run, not investing in branding can hold them back.”
To give people their due, brand is one of those terms which can mean you wade into the nebulous, feel-good-but-devoid-of-meaning language that tends to characterise Diary of a CEO episodes, self-congratulatory LinkedIn posts, and Tony Robbins YouTube clips. Revulsion is a natural consequence of that. So what do we actually mean by the term?
To my mind, there are three things that ‘good branding’ achieves…
- People immediately associate a specific product / service with your company
- People trust your company
- People have some functional / quality-based perception of what your company does
To use an example from outside the brokerage industry, if I said ‘buy an expensive suit’ you might think of Savile Row. If I said ‘buy a cheap suit for a wedding’ then you might think of M&S, Moss Bros, or Charles Tyrwhitt. Alternatively if I said ‘rent a morning suit’, Lipman’s (if you’re in London) might come to mind. Probably you have local equivalents if you’re not in the UK.
The point is there are probably loads of places you could buy a suit. But brand means you tend to think immediately of one or two companies, have some quality association with them, and trust them. You know that if you get an M&S suit it will not be amazing, but you trust it will get the job done.
The combination of these factors creates what is the ultimate benefit of having a good brand. Either someone sees you and goes ‘ok, I will buy what you are selling’ or when they finally want to buy your product / service, they will default to buying it from your company. As the example at the beginning of this post also illustrates, it also helps partners trust you too, meaning they are more likely to work with you and sell your product.
“ATFX’s focus on brand marketing has really paid off, helping us establish ourselves as a leading player in the industry,” said ATFX Global Head of Marketing Weems Chan. “Our sponsorships and campaigns have boosted our global recognition, allowing us to enter competitive markets with a solid reputation already in place. The seven-year connection with the Duke of Edinburgh Cup, for example, brought us not only brand marketing achievements but also exceptional experiences to our clients that are incentives for them to work with us.”
Despite these benefits, the overarching problem of convincing people that brand marketing is a worthwhile endeavor remains, in large part because of cost and time. Building a brand is not cheap and takes a long time to achieve. To use a different example, many brokers could probably achieve much better results in organic search than they are, but it takes several years of investment to make that happen. When you are accustomed to quick payback periods – sometimes literally a matter of weeks – that can be a hard pill to swallow.
One way to counter this is to – as large an extent as possible – capture the impact that your efforts are having. Although this is not going to be as accurate as some kind of CPA agreement, there are still things you can do.
“It takes time to see the impact of brand, including sponsorship efforts, and it’s important to understand and plan for that,” said Hannah Hill, Axi’s Head of Brand and Sponsorship. “At Axi, we employ a comprehensive approach to measure the effectiveness of our activities. This includes tracking awareness and consideration metrics, analysing web analytics, and monitoring social media engagement to name a few. Additionally, we regularly conduct surveys and polls with our customers and partners to gain insights into why Axi was included in their consideration set, how they discovered us, and their perceptions of our brand.”
If you are in the ‘why bother’ category, there are two other ways of thinking about this.
One is whether larger brokers invest in brand because they are successful or vice versa. If you look at Plus500, they have been big on this since close to the beginning. Exness has done the same and over the last few years has smashed it out of the park at the same time it has been investing heavily in brand. Peers that were on a similar level to them previously have not.
The second is to potentially think about this as something like a high risk investment. Imagine something like tail risk hedging – you bleed a lot but eventually get a massive payback. If you only invest what you can afford to lose, then you won’t be that bothered if you lose the cash but you could end up with a huge payback in a couple of years time. I don’t know if that’s the best way to think about brand marketing, but it might be more convincing than saying you are guaranteed to succeed with every penny you spend.
And if you still don’t believe me that this stuff matters, I have one friend who will consistently make fun of me for being involved in this industry. The line he always uses is to say – in a spivvy voice – ‘trading’s not for everybody, but if you are a trader…’
What is this actually from?
It’s a Plus500 ad that came out more than five years ago.