Give your FS brand
an unfair advantage

How do you get an Unfair Advantage in Financial Services marketing?

Even if FS creative generally has lower levels of consumer interest, we know how you can change the rules to make it more interesting.

Guy & Co specialises in challenging how to plan and creatively solve financial service campaigns for clients such as Aegon and the esure Group. Clients who also believe in disrupting category norms and tropes to cut-through the clutter.

We respect the C-word. But compliance doesn’t have to be the FUN police.

As part of our Unfair Advantage System, we regularly test creative dev with real target consumers AND intermediaries across pension and insurance propositions, private banking and asset management.

Humans view FS as a lower interest category. Compared to our Food and Drink client creative it consistently performs to lower Meaningful and Uniqueness baseline scores. 

We test lots of things, but we know that asking “would people buy it” and “is it new and different” makes the biggest difference to creative messaging potential.

Understandably they’d rather try a delicious new sherry cask finish whisky than consider a new workplace pension proposition.

Big watch-out then is to make sure the brand insight and creative don’t land in generic messaging territory, that’s when we create a problem of engagement. The kind of creative that when you cover up the logo it could be anyone. Maybe the C-word got overly involved or there’s a low-risk appetite to push for a distinctive creative territory.

An example of successfully going somewhere new was a recent campaign for Life Insurance client, The Exeter. Every year the category communicates their claims that have been paid – and it can be a yearly churn of ‘same old same old’. But The Exeter was open to being challenged and through consumer and intermediary testing we got to a place that was ‘Claims paid = differences made’. A strong line, but it was when we visually dramatised the impact of paying claims in a surreal and story-driven way that the campaign leapt through distinctiveness levels. It’s been the most successful claims campaign for The Exeter ever – because they leaned into challenging the norm.

Financial Services are a vital part of everyone’s lives, and we can creatively escape the gravitational pull of normalising and complying. When we do, we have the potential to be Bravely Effective. 

Talk to us if you want to give your FS brand an Unfair Advantage.

Interested? Give us a shout!