"The
New Color of Money"
By Leon Lazaroff
On
the morning of Sept. 12, Stephen Liguori, global retail marketing
officer at Morgan Stanley, opened The Wall Street Journal to an
advertisement trumpeting the brokerage giant as "The New Old Boys
Club: Less Old, Less Boys."
It
was hardly an affirming moment for Liguori, a former Kraft Foods
and PepsiCo marketer who came to Morgan Stanley in early 2001 to
create its retail division's first consumer marketing department.
He had spent the summer working on a multimillion dollar rebranding
campaign to address the company's April decision to shorten its
name from Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, recasting itself as a popular
institution along the lines of Merrill Lynch.
Building
on its earlier "Well connected" theme, Morgan Stanley launched a
campaign, via Leo Burnett, around Labor Day. Print ads showed closeup
portraits of women with the "New Old Boys Club" headline and such
copy as: "Once upon a time, making money was the domain of country
clubs and smoky back rooms. But not anymore." In a related TV spot,
a stylish and confident-looking businesswoman strides through an
airport terminal to the futuristic sounds of Madonna's "Ray of Light,"
while the narrator intones: "Welcome to the new old boys club: Less
old, less boys."
Tim
O'Day, senior account director at Leo Burnett, explained that the
ads were a way of saying to those who might not be intimately familiar
with Morgan Stanley: "Hey we're not a bunch of stodgy old bankers."
But
given the tragedies that had just transpired in New York and Washington,
D.C., Liguori feared the worst. "This was totally inappropriate;
I was floored," he said. "We had to change everything. Everything
we had done to market this firm up to Sept. 11 was now totally worthless
and irrelevant."
Liguori
was not alone. In the wake of the attacks, the nation's leading
financial services giants-many also in the midst of major rebranding
campaigns, including Merrill Lynch, UBSWarburg and J.P Morgan Chase-
faced an even more daunting environment and complicated repositioning
task.
Now,
financial services firms acknowledge a shared sense of insecurity
surrounding the volatile stock market, massive layoffs, an official
recession, domestic terrorism (threats) and images of US troops
in overseas combat. All of which places greater urgency on the marketing
part of the equation.
"There's
been a massive change the likes we've not seen in a generation and
a half," said Liz Nickles, director of marketing and advertising
at Credit Suisse First Boston, N.Y "No one is just lobbing something
out there. When you're attached to anything that has to do with
economic issues, the financial landscape, it's something people
are very concerned about. For all marketers, this is an extremely
difficult environment."
Long
before Sept. 11, the comedic brand of advertising that put financial
institutions like E*Trade on the map in the late '90s had given
way to more restrained, economically sensitive pitches about the
benefits of sound advice and stable management. In the aftermath
of the attacks, investors' concerns about their financial futures
were compounded by fears for their personal safety. The consensus
among marketers was that they needed to speak to those apprehensions,
or at least avoid anything that would seem insensitive.
Yet
the result has been a lot of safe advertising that does little to
differentiate a brand, argued Charles Wendel, president of Financial
Institutions Consulting, N.Y. "It's been difficult to distinguish
between the various investment banks since Sept. 11," Wendel said.
"There's been a lot of flag waving, but giving a reason why a client
should call up an investment banker at this time is proving much
more difficult." Major challenges for financial services companies
began to take shape in the last few years, as top-tier investment
banks endured a steep decline in corporate mergers and acquisitions,
the big-dollar transactions that generated billions for the industry
in the '90s. At the same time, the dot-com bubble that made mega-millionaires
out of investors and media stars out of brokers, suddenly burst.
As result, firms that added hundreds of bankers and support staff
when the economy was booming have had little choice but to lay off
thousands as fees and revenue streams dried up.
Profits
at U.S. securities firms are expected to drop 47% in 2001, according
to the Securities Industry Association. Since reaching a historic
peak earlier this year, the brokerage industry has eliminated more
than 25,000 jobs, with more cuts likely.
The
bar has been raised for financial marketers, as a decade's worth
of activity produced an industry whose connection to and relationship
with investors has badly deteriorated. Even as the economy blossomed,
customers often came to see investment bankers as being more concerned
with the churn of a stock sale than their clients' financial stability.
So
in today's less-trusting investor climate, what can companies do
to win back customer loyalty? Ted Flinn, a former Wall Street banker
now at the Greenwich, Conn.-based consultancy Berni Marketing &
Design, said that while any top investment bank can claim to have
a financial specialty, marketing teams are eager to demonstrate
an ability to offer more than just knowledge and skill.
"Banks
want to offer an emotive feeling," Flinn said. "They are saying,
"If you're one of our clients, we won't just make you money: We'll
make you feel a certain way."
For
years, the idea of branding a bank was like suggesting that cheerleaders
be used at baseball games. In the mid-'90s, though, that view began
to change. Investment banks came to resemble ice cream flavors:
each had particular characteristics and everyone had a favorite.
While the Internet fostered a booming economy, the popularity of
mutual funds and widespread use of 401K plans connected average
folks to Wall Street. Investment banks that had little or no retail
business were suddenly opening storefronts and launching online
trading operations.
Now
that the economy is in recession, companies have had to summon pro-active
marketing messages so retail customers and corporations will turn
to them for financial advice and profitable products.
Part
of the challenge is helping customers navigate a vastly changed
landscape. For example, when German giant UBS Warburg merged with
Paine Webber last fall, executives needed to market a European bank
to a U.S. audience while helping investors make the connection between
the holding company (UBS) and its components UBS Warburg, UBS Paine
Webber and UBS Asset Management.
The
firm is building awareness through a series of red-and-white print
ads running in financial publications including The Economist and
Barron's. The ads are written in the format of questions and answers,
such as: "What's the benefit of having 28,000 employees in the U.S.
and 71,000 worldwide? Depth. Depth is having expert coverage in
every sector and market you care about..." Another ad asks: "What
does $1.5 trillion of client assets mean?" The answer: "Trust."
Berni Marketing
& Design
800-BERNI-58 * www.bernidesign.com
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