Join us as we explore this transformative journey and gain insights into how Ben is forging new paths in the financial services marketing landscape. Ben, thank you for joining us today.

You're brand director at Phoenix Group, but you've you've had a very interesting career to to get to to becoming brand director at Phoenix Group. Can you can you give us a bit of background information about how you how you got to this point?

Sure.

So my I've had a career in kind of several parts. So the first roughly decade, I actually spent agency side.

Started off in the studio actually out of university, didn't know what I was gonna do, and ended up doing some copyright and some design work.

Realized that a, I wasn't very good at that, but I loved the atmosphere in the industry.

So I decided that I would stay in advertising and marketing. And I took some advice and they said, look, you've come in quite an unconventional route. If you wanna really survive and do well here, you're gonna need to specialize in something.

Because you haven't come on a grad program or anything like that, know, mainly TV ads. It's gonna be quite hard to get to a big agency with no experience like that. So they said, specialize in financial services. No one wants to do it.

Every age but every agency has a really big financial services client. Be that person who can manage that account. Right. So I kind of, at the sort of tender age of, I don't know, twenty two, I went, cool.

I'll give that a go. And that's exactly what I did. And I moved from a very small provincial agency up to a financial specialist agency in London, then jumped around a little bit and worked in a number of agencies and ended up ultimately at McCann Erickson where I spent a couple of years there leading the JPMorgan Fleming asset management account across Europe amongst a whole range of other sector brands as well. I ran the Microsoft account in the UK and some work on Johnson and Johnson, a couple of franchises across Europe for their brands, which was fabulous experience.

So that was the first the first kind of session.

Very good advice whoever gave you that, wasn't it? It was very kind of and it clearly worked as a strategy.

Absolutely life changing. Fabulous. Absolutely life changing. What I would say is I really don't regret the first sort of six months to nine months that I spent kinda in the production side of things.

I mean, even did a small stint at a repro house. And, you know, I I really valued understanding a bit about how you physically make stuff, and that has been hugely valuable to me. Yes. It feels like there's bit of a grounding Yeah.

Yeah. In the kind of craft of actually what you do. Now I'm hopeless as, you know, on the design front myself personally, but actually being in that environment was really powerful.

A previous guest on the podcast, Laura Brown from M and G, talked about the t shaped marketer, broad generic experience across the top, but very deep sector, single sector experience. I think that's what you're referring to.

Yeah I think so, I think more broadly within, you know, having spent, you know, roughly a decade in agencies on a variety of different types of business, I've worked with some amazing people and I really learned the craft of communication and brand building there, kind of you know, at their feet and actually really seeing how these people do it. I think that's whilst marketing is much broader than just advertising, it was the way that I got into marketing.

Yes.

And it's always been something that that I can lean back on. And and is, you know, in terms of that t shaped piece, it's very much the kind of the specialism that I kind of I came into before I kind of got into more kind of management and leadership roles.

After McCann, where where did your journey take you?

Yeah. So I decided that I should go in house, and I was approached by Mastercard to come in and rebrand what was then a payment brand, debit payment brand called Switch, which they just bought from a couple of banks, and to rebrand that to a brand called Maestro. It doesn't exist in the UK anymore, but it was Mastercard's European debit payment brand. So I jumped in house to go and do that.

I was the only debit marketer in the whole of Europe for Mastercard because everything was credit based, And that was a fabulous experience. It was a it was a brilliant thing to do. And it was a lovely transition from being because Mastercard was very very kind of brand focused and very kind of advertising and activation focused, it was a real natural transition for me to kind of go into that kind of role. And after about a year of of working on the debit business, I then moved across onto the onto the credit card side of things and and ended up running the priceless campaign and all the sponsorships in the UK which was, you know, absolutely fabulous.

Yeah. Absolutely fabulous.

Incredible campaign.

Yeah. And and it but it was MasterCard was really where I kinda got my commercial chops, though. Think, I mean, they had some terrific marketers there. A lot of them were kinda ex Procter and Gamble from all around the world, and because it was a truly global business, you know, you'd people from, I know, Latin America coming in to be the regional head of marketing for Europe and work very closely with the guys in the States.

And that's really where, you know, I learned how to read a P and L. I learned how to to kind of follow the money and work out where we should be focusing our activity on rather than, you know, what was easy to do. Yeah. And that was so that was a huge learning for me coming out of agency which was just really about craft, into actually how do I how do we how do we really make money?

Effectiveness.

Yeah and effectiveness, and how do we do that but in a very brand centric environment. So that that that was phenomenal. I did that about five years, but I reached the point I had a I had had two young kids and a third on the way. MasterCard was very very kind of global, a lot of travel involved, and to progress beyond the UK I would either have had to have taken a regional role or gone to work in a different geography and that just wasn't on the table for me. And so I took a bit of a punt actually. I was approached about joining Royal Mail as their head of brand and marketing in the run up to them having their IPO.

And I just thought, well that seems like a really brilliant job.

You know, the last public service to be, you know, to kind of go public and a dusty old brand, I'll go in and kind of, you know, spread a bit of magic dust around and see what I can rustle up. I mean, don't know what I was thinking, if I'm honest with you. You know, MasterCove is a very low headcount global organization, huge budgets, and we outsource loads to our agencies. I mean, this is like two thousand two thousand and five to two thousand ten, I mean you know digital was really still quite nascent. I mean we had websites but you know there really wasn't, you know the kind of social media activation that you do these days. Mean Facebook was around but I mean might have had a million users in the UK, it really wasn't big.

So it was very very outsourced. I go to a land at Royal Mail and it's like, you know, a team of, you know, fifty people or something, and a business in turnaround not in growth, and I'd always been used to working in a high growth business with large budgets and I'm suddenly in a turnaround environment. I'm in an environment which was very b to b as well as b to c, which I hadn't really thought about when I joined, but most of the revenue that Royal Mail makes is from businesses asking it to deliver parcels or letters, not not from consumers sending things in the post.

So I had to lean on a lot of what I learned in agencies. I did a lot of b to b advertising when was an agency. So that that was that was really interesting and also a completely sclerotic organisation, huge bureaucracy. Mean you know a court of infra appeal, you can never get anything done without speaking to about fifteen different people.

Really quite challenging. It wasn't about me being the cleverest person in the room, It was absolutely about how do I influence and inspire huge teams of people to go out and do the right thing in a very commercial way because what I found at Royal Mail, when I joined it was still a monopoly, very heavily regulated. They'd never had to sell to anyone really through marketing because everyone had to buy their products anyway. So so there was very very poor commercial understanding and commercial acumen. So I spent a lot of time there. I ended up being a role model for ten years in a variety of different roles. The last three as group marketing director, I ran all the marketing, the brand building and all of digital, set up social media for just a million and one different things.

Took redundancy in the middle of Covid. I'd done my ten years. I thought that was enough. They were doing another big round of kind of cost cutting. I thought right that's it, I've had enough now. Because of the terms of my redundancy I couldn't actually take any paid work for a period of time, so I had quite a lot of time on my hands. So I thought I'm going to use this as an opportunity to, you know, work out what I want to do next.

I'm not sure I really want to go into another role like I had at Royal Mail. It was, I found I was quite tired after that.

Was quite draining. I did lots of different things. I got involved with some startups, through Oxford University. They had like an incubator there called the Foundry, and so I kind of did a bit of work with them. I worked with some charities just to kind of help them get through some stuff, and it was really interesting. I learned very quickly that I don't want to go into consultancy.

The thing I miss the most actually is, you know, people coming to me saying how do I solve this, what do I do, and kind of managing a team. I really missed not having that kind of level of interaction, which I didn't appreciate when I was working actually. Was only afterwards when you kind of go, oh there's no one asking my advice for anything.

That's a bit odd.

I also realised I want to get back into kind of the things I enjoyed the most which were much more creative. You know when you go up the greasy pole and you end up in a kind of a big CMO or a big group marketing director role like I had, you spend your life in meetings and it's quite dry and it can be quite soul destroying because you become further and further and further away from the actual product that you're creating.

And I just thought, know, after ten years of doing that, I don't want to do that anymore. I want to get much more back into it. So I joined GSK very briefly. I did a contract for them helping their global brand director set up a new function as they were splitting out their consumer division, and I helped Philippa kind of appoint the agency, Wolff Owens I think it was, to kind of do the rebrand of GSK and it allowed me like, you know, the most amazing fun to kind of just get back into design and brand and brand strategy to a level that I hadn't done for years. Just realised that I really enjoyed doing that. But while it was never going to be a permanent gig, was always just to go in and help Philippa set the function up, And started I got approached by Phoenix about this role as brand director and it was a very long recruitment process. I mean about four months.

But I realised that this was a role that offered me the sweet spot of what I wanted. So I decided that was definitely going to be the right thing to do. So yeah about two and a half, nearly three years ago I left GSK and went into Phoenix to set up a brand function transform their brand.

So when you say set up a brand function, that's was that literally setting up from scratch?

Well, not quite scratch, but pretty much scratch. So Phoenix Phoenix has been around for a very long time, but it's but it had been very much a kind of, I guess, a financial, you know, how would you describe it, a back book consolidator. So it was a business built around merger and acquisition. It bought up closed book life funds, so defined benefit schemes effectively old pensions that needed to be serviced and put them onto their digital platform and basically made sure that those members of those schemes have secure income in their retirements from, you know, great brands from yester yesteryear like Abbey Life, Britannic Assurance, Pearl Assurance, various bits of Old Mutual and I mean you know big books of business of pension schemes that you know those companies you know no longer existed but the pensions still need to be looked after so that's what Phoenix did.

It and it grew inorganically. It you know, it was you know, it still is very well known in the city for for m and a and it was brilliant at buying up those businesses. So it didn't grow organically. It didn't have to win customers. It bought them and then and then managed them. But they had made a decision about probably a year before I joined. Appointed a new chief executive, a guy called Andy Briggs, who came from Aviva, to transform the business into being an open book business as well as a closed book business.

And on the basis that What sorry.

What does that mean open book business versus closed books?

So closed book, you're basically you're buying up these bits of business where you can't market to the customers, you just you just you just manage them their annuity or their with profits or whatever the product was that that that they had the previous company. An open book business is one that wins customers and can sell them products.

So still in the market.

Yeah, in the market. And the reason why they wanted to have the open book division was because there's only so many defined benefit pension schemes that are available in market at any one point in time, and it's a kind of declining market as the whole world in the UK has moved towards kind of defined contribution schemes. I see.

So when Andy came in, his mission was to kind of transform the business, he made a number of acquisitions when he did that.

He bought another very big closed book consolidating business called ReAssure from Swiss Re, and then he also bought the Standard Life brand and life business from Aberdeen, which is where Standard Life Aberdeen kind of had to do their rebrand to Aberdeen.

We had the two former co CMOs that handled that rebrand. They were our second guests on this podcast.

Excellent. Yeah. Standard Life Aberdeen had always managed. It was a key strategic partner of Phoenix Group anyway, managed an awful lot of the funds for the for the books of business that we had.

But Andy wanted to to trans you know, to have a growing business. And we thought, rather than build a brand from scratch, let's buy the Standard Life brand. It hasn't really been invested in while it's been part of Aberdeen. Let's reinvigorate it and use you know, use that as our entry to having an organically growing business alongside our inorganically growing business.

So we still do M and A but we also want to win new workplace business, for example. So this has all been going on, in the background while I was going through a recruitment process, they knew that they wanted a brand director to kind of come in and kind of work out a couple of things really. One is what should our brand strategy be for the group?

And also a couple of decisions have been made around the sort of the basic architecture of the group, which was that it was going to be a portfolio of brands.

Just because we literally just bought all these brands and brought them together, was no way we were going be able to transition them over to one single brand anytime soon.

So there was always going to be a portfolio.

So a key thing was well how do we arrange those brands to get maximum value and really achieve our enterprise strategy overall?

So yes, so when I came in there was a website manager and a social media manager that had been recruited about two or three months before I joined and nothing else.

Goodness.

And so I set about trying to understand the core business strategy. I that's the point about brand strategy is that it's a slave to the, what I would call the enterprise strategy. So what do we want to achieve as a entity, as a company? What is it that we want to achieve?

And then and then the brand strategy is an enabler of that. So so the the two have gotta be connected. And and and key key to our enterprise strategy were we want to be a purpose led organisation because through all these acquisitions we suddenly became an enormous company. We went from five hundred people to six thousand employees.

We went to being, you know, UK's largest long term savings and retirement business with about three hundred billion pounds assets under administration. So suddenly we were just this enormous player that had a huge amount of clout if we wanted to use it.

And I think the chairman and the CEO very much said well there's lots of problems with the pensions industry.

We're the biggest by size.

We should absolutely lean into that, know, we really Take responsibility. And also I think regulation pushes I think a lot of financial services businesses to be quite purpose led, And so that was a key part of the enterprise strategy is that we, you know, by purpose led what I mean is we want to make societal change for the better and that there's a group of stakeholders that we need to join together because, you know, on the basis that we are purpose led, for example, we can, the hypothesis is, we can recruit and retain better people, we can build better products, we can be more efficient, which means we can price better and we can win more business.

If we do that we can make more money, which means we can invest back in the business and we can keep our shareholders happy.

So you kind of get a really circular strategy working that sits behind kind of With each benefit building on this.

With each benefit building off the rest of it. That's the that's the theory and that's at the heart of our enterprise strategy is being purpose led. You know when I think about the brand strategy I kind of go right well well that's right at the heart of it. There's other bits in our enterprise strategy around growth, around kind of resilience and around kind of efficiency, which are really important, know.

And so my brand strategy has got to kind of support all of those as well. Yes. I can't have a brand model that is inefficient. I can't have I need a brand model that amplifies our resilience and financial strength to help us grow.

I need to have a brand strategy that supports growth as well as our inorganic growth.

So so those were kind of really really kind of key sort of variables that you start to play with and kind of go, well, I've got all these brands now, there's about six of them in the in the group, how do I arrange them all to maximize the value and support that enterprise strategy?

Bigger than the sum of the parts type of It's it's absolutely that.

Yeah. And and and of course, what you realize quite quickly is that the only way that's gonna work is that corporate brand needs to be a bit stronger than it is today because Phoenix isn't a very well known brand, even amongst corporate brands wasn't terribly well known. So you kind of go, well, if if Phoenix as the master brand embodies the purpose, embodies what the enterprise is about and is also the voice that talks to the regulator, the voice that talks to government and kind of key influencers, they need to know who we are and what we're doing and why we're doing it.

And so kind of, you know, at that point you kind of go right, well then job number one is to sort out what phoenix, how it turns up, Right? What what does it look like? How does it sound? You want staff to be proud of it. It needs to feel modern. It needs to know, there's a whole bunch of things that you would want that corporate brand to represent so it can be a good parent.

I've heard brand being described as it's what people say about you when you leave the room.

Do you ascribe to that definition of I guess to a degree, I think that's cool if you are a big well known brand.

Okay. The the most important thing is being invited into the room.

Right. Yeah.

Right. And that is a key role of of of brand building is to have that level of salience and recall that they actually say come and talk to us.

And then you know once you're there, then you kind of you know the taste that you leave behind, the memory, that's equally important.

But where Phoenix was when I joined was it was enormous, but no one knew who we were, and then the kind of the strategy and the narrative wasn't really clear.

So the job really kind of in day one was to kind of come in and go, right, well I need to build a team that can help me do this, and also, you know, so I I need to to I didn't rebrand Phoenix Group, I guess I refreshed its identity and transformed it from being this kind of back book consolidator into being this much more purpose led and modern company.

And then in parallel, we're saying, right, what's the brand strategy overall? How do we arrange our brands? How do we create some linkage between them? Maybe we can come onto that in a bit, and I can talk you through how we did that.

We spoke previously, and but when when you described part of the the refreshment of the of the Fenix brand, you talked about developing the sonic branding of Fenix, and we we've never had anyone on the on the podcast before that's been that's that's gone through that process.

So I wonder if you can elaborate on the creative process of developing a sonic brand and how that may differ from what business as usual is. So the way I want answer that is just to kind of go back to the kind of the core design principles that sit behind the whole identity and then how we take that into a kind of sonic kind of expression, I guess.

So so at the heart of when we were when we were defining what we wanted Phoenix to be like, we ended up and you know, if anyone's done any kind of brand refresh or or brand development, you end up in these kind of crazy meetings where you talk about a lot of adjectives. So what do you want this business to be? Yeah. And at the heart of it, we wanted the business to be expert.

We wanted it to be known. We wanted it to be empathetic. By that, I mean, kind of quite customer focused and approachable. We wanted it to be trusted and dependable.

Really, really important in financial services especially if you're running people's pensions that you know you're going be around for a bit. But we also wanted to be optimistic and progressive.

So those adjectives were actually what helped us define what our purpose would be and sit right at the core is what kind of what I would call the kind of the spirit of of of the company. And so I use those six, words as my design principles for everything to do with the brand refresh.

So whether that was creating a typeface or whether it was the design system, the colorways, the way we use graphics, there was always this trade off between, you know, are they do they make us come across as expert, I e, simple, clear, easy to understand, empathetic, optimistic, etcetera. So I just used those and it was a really great vernacular to have with the design team that we were working with as a kind of lens to kind of look at everything.

Yes yeah.

And avoid, you know, the dread of the kind of flourish, which is what happens in design world a lot. You get a lot of kind of little things that appear because they look nice. And you kind of go, yeah but does that really help?

They're almost principles to keep you on the straight and narrow really aren't they?

Yeah they They're parameters for you to work with.

They are, and I think, know, and when you're and when you're doing, I mean, come to Sonics in sec, but when you know, but when you're when you're doing kind of like, you know, straightforward design around kind of color or or shape or type, using adjectives like that is really really really helpful, and you can most people can visualize quite quickly what you mean by you know, know, having a sense of kind of trust and reliability. So you know, it might mean the way you shape the baseline of your type is that they are all quite solid. I know these are small things but actually when you add it all up into a system it really really makes a big difference. So alongside the kind of two d stuff we also did some motion work as well about how we wanted to kind of rock and we live in such an AV world now. So how do we want our logo to appear? How do we want movement to happen?

And that was really interesting because that was for me was again a really it was like a stepping stone into the Sonics because then you start talking about well how do I show kind of being kind of trusted and reliable through movement? How, you know, so actually you end up going well actually it's just got to be really controlled, right? It's got to feel powerful and it's got to be controlled. So when developing our identity we've got these kind of three feathers that we use, the name's Phoenix, so you know the obvious analogy there.

And the way the feather shapes move, so almost like a kind of wing flying, is full of control, right? And it's just, you know, you're translating those attributes into your kind of design language.

So then we took that into Sonics. I mean, I think Sonics are massively important as a kind of distinctive asset to help kind of as a shortcut cue into oh it's that brand.

Is a sonic agency?

We worked with an agency called Audity. Actually they're based out of Germany.

But they were brilliant. They had a little they had like it was almost like leading somebody in the dark to be honest with you because we hadn't done this before at all. And they had a sort of tool which they used where you could kind of, you know, they were kind of, is it more like this or is it more like this? And there was like, you know, about fifty different variations that you could kind of go through.

And then then they kind of came back and said look we think you're in these kind of territories, at which point oh no it's definitely not that!' And we were able to kind of filter stuff down, and then you know as we started to kind of hear examples, which was really really helpful, we were able to kind of define what we meant by these terms like expert and empathetic musically.

It's a fascinating process.

It was a fascinating process and it's and what the really and then when we started working with the composer was, you know, he basically broke the we created a soundtrack and then from the soundtrack you extract bits that you can then use for your sort of mnemonic logo or for, different, the soundtrack is about three or four minutes long, but you'd never really play it. That's not the purpose of it. It's it's more about those three separate movements in it. Yeah.

We we did we we created the soundtrack for Phoenix about the flight of a phoenix. Right. It starts off slow. It's called rising, the first movement, and it's all about kind of taking off and getting up.

Right? And then you get to the kind of crescendo when you're flying at pace and then there's this kind of landing where the kind of diminuendo where you kind of come down at the end. So we had all these different movements and then with each of those movements you have different layers that you have. So you have your kind of your base layer, so what's the rhythm, what's the base kind of what's the driving force behind the music.

You then have the middle layer which is the chords that are holding the damn thing together, and then you have the, you know, the kind of leitmotif, the melody that sits on top.

And so each of those have got different roles to play when you're creating something.

I mean it was a fabulous experience to go Forgive me if I've got this wrong, it feels like the output that you end up with is almost a kit of parts that you can utilise in different ways. Is that what Yeah, think that's true because I where we ended up is we ended up with this kind of core soundtrack, and we said well that's brilliant, that's fine, but now what's the really revved up version of it, and then what's the really paired back version of it?

Because you've these three different movements, you've got these different layers happening, you've then got different kind of levels of intensity.

And so we built a tool which we could use and the guys use it internally quite a lot where they can effectively go right where we want want this bass part from this movement and this level of intensity and we're going to put this leitmotif on it from over here. So you can effectively create it yourself.

It's a really really powerful way of being able to hold things together, especially when you're a lot of videos and all the rest of it where you've got kind of soundtracks.

To not constantly recreate the sonic, but to actually have something that that It's almost like a variation, is it?

It's a variation. Yeah. It's variations. So like the leitmotif holds it together and also we've got a couple of distinctive elements within within the way the soundtrack works. Yeah. Which are very phoenix. And obviously internally, everyone, poor souls, know it now because, you know, on every corporate video or whatever, they are exposed to it.

But it's, yeah, it's it's it's it was a fabulous experience. Really enjoyed enjoyed doing it. And it's been, you know, I think it's very distinctive for us, and it also just projects us a bit beyond a kind of boring life and pensions company.

It's it's classic Ehrenberg Bass distinctive asset. It's it's not an asset that every brand or business has. I don't think there's you know, there are not that many well known Sonic brands. I'm interested in just in your thoughts on this. Do you think that in order to gain benefits of a Sonic brand asset, that you need to be a company of a certain size or do you think it's it's actually something that will start being utilized by all sorts of size organizations?

I don't think it's about size necessarily. Mean, I think I think you've got to have a very clear design system. You've got you've got to know what it is you're trying to communicate and I think the relevance comes into the channels that you're using.

I knew from a corporate brand perspective that Phoenix Group doesn't really exist in the real world. We don't have products, We don't have offices that people can see in the street, have other shops.

So so we're very much gonna live, in the minds of people and through pretty much digital channels these days.

And you previously mentioned the importance of audiovisual.

Yeah and so therefore AV becomes massively important and your identity becomes massively important because people are gonna hear you as much as they're gonna see you.

Increasingly more so.

Yeah so and so I thought you know what this is this is probably you know, especially if we've got very low awareness, so I want to build some distinctive assets that can be very consistent and managed over time.

I just, you know, I figured that this was gonna be a really good way of doing it. The same emotion actually as well and kind of how we kind of rock up and appear in animations and in films and our end frames and stuff like that.

Really I think that if you can get a design system working really well, it becomes very distinctive very quickly and people don't need to see the logo to know that oh it's that Fabulous.

That's absolutely fascinating to thanks for going through that. It sounds a beautiful process to go over, really enjoyable. One last question on that. How long approximately start to end that you went through in that?

Well the whole rebrand, we started the work in the June and I launched it in the March.

Okay.

So about nine months. Yeah. And we built the Sonics probably over a three month period, I would have thought.

How does that then start maneuvering into brand campaigns? And also how does that where it's a portfolio of individual brands, how does that also then start filtering down into the brand strategy into the individual brands such as Standard Life?

Yeah. Yeah. Big big topics. So so alright. So so so Phoenix is the kind of the master brand, right? So we have to embody the purpose, have to represent it, and therefore to have real impact we have to do things, right? People remember actions not words.

So very important that we achieve change and we are seen to be participating in, at times leading, the debate around what needs to change.

So from a campaign's perspective, but also for customer brands as well, being a good parent that is the kind of composite of everything, it's really important we do things that they can kind of go, we're part of this group that are doing these amazing things, crudely.

Quite important.

It goes back to the bigger than the sum of the parts.

Yeah I think so, and I think in different categories it's more important than not. So for Standard Life and our workplace business, was really important that the Standard Life team could say look we've been bought by Phoenix, know there's this huge company, really really strong, massively committed to the industry and they're investing x amount in our business to help us build new propositions, improve our service, all the things that didn't happen when we were part of Stand Alive Aberdeen. So it was really important they accept, but that meant we had to demonstrate that we were actually doing that.

And that's really where where our kind of campaigning came in. And so what underpinned all of that was some proper customer insight though. So we we did a whole program of research amongst all the different stakeholder groups that the Phoenix Group, the corporate brand needed to appeal to. So whether that's the media, key influences there or in government and policymakers in the city and investors, future talent that we want to recruit into the organisation, kind of key commentators that are just out and about, what we kind of call our engaged public.

So the whole IFA and financial intermediary markets that that you know have a huge impact on our business and through our brands.

Was this going to speak directly to all of these different Yeah.

We so we so we there's about seven different audiences that we wanted to really understand and and I went in with a with some qualitative first and then we did some quant. And I want to understand, a couple of really important things. So first thing is, you know, when they think about a company like Phoenix that is the largest long term savings and retirement business in the UK, what do they expect from it? What do they want from that company?

What's the most important thing that they want?

And then, what would what things could we do that would drive the highest amount of advocacy? So it's almost irrespective of Phoenix, just if you were the biggest and you were facing that, what would you want them to do and be like? We then did a bit of kind of key driver analysis where we kind of chewed all the results of that up to create a very simple two by two that kind of plotted the things that are most important versus the things that drive the most amount of advocacy.

And we did that for each of the audiences then we crashed it together to kind of create an overarching view.

Hugely important piece of work to do because it just shone lights on the things that were massively important to our audiences.

And some of them are really obvious, you know, you've got to have good customer service, you've got to have decent pricing, you've got to be accessible, etc.

Those things were really important. Don't drive any advocacy though, they're just table stakes. You've just got to be really good at those. So then you ask yourself the question, are we? Yeah. And what programs we need to put in place to be better at those?

Then on the advocacy side, you know, lot of the answers when you look at just what would drive advocacy, they kind of go oh you need to advertise, you need to sponsor, and you certainly go oh brilliant that sounds great! But then you kind of go but that's not important to people, right? So the sweet spot is the top right. What drives the most amount of advocacy and what is most important?

And there was one answer in there and the one answer is help people manage their finances through their kind of very long life that they're having. How do they plan for it? What do they do? We just launched the think tank called Phoenix Insights, which is all about longevity and the impact of longer lives on society and in particular what that meant for the pension and retirement business.

And it's a space that, whilst a lot of competitors cover it, none of them really own it.

And we thought you know what, that's what we want to do.

So that was important for me from a kind of brand building perspective because if I want to be purposeful then actually this is a massive issue. Mean I think it's something like seventeen million people in adults in the UK, working age adults, are not saving enough for retirement and certainly won't have enough money to have the kind of retirement that they are hoping to have.

I think that's fairly well reported.

That's, you know, there's only forty million working age people, so you know that's quite a large proportion of the population are going to have a pretty poor longer life. One in three children born today will live until they're one hundred. I think the actuary is telling me one in four fifteen year olds today will live to be one hundred and twenty.

Right, so you want to retire at sixty, how much money have you got to have saved? Or do you want to live on the state pension?

Really difficult.

For a long time.

Really really difficult. Yeah.

I'm presuming there is one then.

So this is quite a big issue and as the largest in the sector, well this is the one that we need to absolutely lean into and own.

Okay.

So when it comes to the campaigning, so it's a long story to get to the Yeah, understand. I'm following. So you do the work and you kind of go right, that is the zone that we need to play in. Yeah. It's worth saying as well actually net zero did kind of come up as well in terms of, and I'll come on to that in a minute, because it's a slightly different audience and slightly different expectations around decarbonisation.

But you know longer lives, helping people plan for it and have a better longer life was definitely the zone. Whether you're an advisor, an MP, a journalist, a customer that was the area that you need to be in. So we started to build out our approach to that and kind of go, well, how do we campaign on this? Right? How do we do this in a way that raises awareness of the issue, but going back to my design attributes, progressive, is optimistic, you know, we're not going to scare people into saving more money.

That isn't going to happen. They're not engaged in the category anyway and Project Fear certainly won't help. So how do we find ways of engaging people in the fact that they're probably gonna live longer, certainly generationally people are living longer and that they probably haven't made enough provision in their working lives for that life that they want to have in the future.

Phoenix Insights, our think tank that we'd set up just after I joined, I started to do quite a lot of research into this area and actually a lot of message testing actually as well to kind of work out how do you engage people in something they're really not interested in and how do you do it in a way that inspires them rather than terrifies them.

And so we started to kind of build out a communications programme which we've executed over the last couple of years. I suppose bit about sort of the works in parallel to this, my view is that we will grow our reputation and our brand strength through talking about these issues and campaigning on effectively our purpose. Now that's you know that's not every brand can do that. A corporate brand certainly can. It's quite important certainly in the b2b space and other categories to be seen as being quite purposeful, values led, good people I want to do business with. Much more important in some categories than others.

But it really really works for us because it allows us to demonstrate what we're doing, the impact that we're making, which then should strengthen people's trust in us and advocacy of us and the kind of things that you want from your kind of brand KPIs.

After rebranding the business, so in twenty twenty two we launched our first campaign largely to our kind of more specialist audiences was called Let's Get Ready and that was just all about talking about how people aren't ready to retire and actually retirement isn't really ready for them either because you know, nothing's set up properly, they're not engaged in And was and that was really helped that worked really well. It certainly helped put us on the radar with a lot of the audiences that we wanted to. But then in twenty twenty three we said right well that was great but what we really need to do is kind of go out to a much broader audience now.

We've kind of done some testing effectively. We want to go to a broader audience and we think we need to start having what we've kind of rather cliched called having a national conversation. We want to spark off a conversation that gets people thinking about and talking about the back end of their lives and if they're going to live longer what do they need to do about it.

It's not a campaign to make people save more money into their pension immediately and that won't work. It's more about recognising that we've all got our own individual agency.

Yeah, don't stop avoiding it.

And you know there are points of time in our lives where we can make decisions that can affect the rest of our lives and especially in a cost of living crisis and you know and food inflation is still eight percent. I mean you know it is really hard for people to save more money and also the amounts of money they'd have to save if they haven't saved enough are so enormous that it's unrealistic to expect them to be able to do it. What's Phoenix doing about it? Well we're lobbying really **** ** auto enrolment and trying to kind of get contributions changed and rules around that change so more people kind of can benefit from that, and we're lobbying very hard around state pension.

But also more to kind of save us and you know the man in the street is to kind of go look, you know, you may well be working for longer.

So actually there's some interesting things which you can do around switching careers, retraining, and just thinking about that.

I've read a great book about that, about people's second career, and it's all about a book about, you know, human life expectancy going to a hundred. Suddenly the idea of actually going into your second career at sixty as opposed to retiring is fabulously exciting.

And the truth is it sort of happens already, it's just it's not celebrated. It's not championed. Very few people reach sixty five or sixty seven and retire. Most people wind down. They'll do something part time, they'll, you know, they'll find ways of still earning a bit of cash.

And when you and when you start scratching the surface and asking people, that's exactly what you find, that they have second careers. They do different things.

Surely a key audience for you though is is the the young generation, because if they started earlier, then everyone gets the benefit of compounding much much quicker, don't they? So is is that a is that a priority for Phoenix?

I think at the moment we've looked at kind of of Gen X, so broadly speaking forty ish to kind of sixty ish.

There's an awful lot of under saving that's happened in that audience and they've got very limited time to make a difference.

I think where we can have more impact with the younger generations is actually around auto enrolment and kind of contribution so that you're right, if they save more for longer, it will have a compound effect.

But we've got a bigger tidal wave problem that's gonna hit In the next twenty years.

Yeah. I think is what we're really kind of leaning into at the moment.

Fair enough, makes sense.

And I think, I mean the other bit I said earlier that I mentioned a little bit about kind of decarbonisation and net zero. So the other really so to solve the pension savings crisis you need to have a broad awareness to get people kind of engaged in that 'damn I need to do something about this, it's my life, I've got to work out what I'm going to do' Potentially kind of good work, better work, staying in work for a bit longer so you either retire later or are able to save a bit more or save for longer really important. The other bit that's really important is that the returns on your savings are really good And that's where decarbonisation comes in as well. And so the way we've approached net zero, and bear in mind we are the largest asset owner in the UK, I think the total assets that we own in the UK represent five percent of the total carbon load in the UK annually.

So when we say we're going to reach net zero that's five percent of the UK's total emissions. That is massive.

So we are pushing very hard and we've got a very we published our transition plan last year we've got a very clear plan as to how we're doing that in stages.

I think by two thousand and thirty we will have a fifty percent reduction, so that's two point five percent of the UK's total carbon emissions. But the point around decarbonisation is it's not just about saving the world. It's also we have a huge fiduciary responsibility, but we also see risk in not decarbonising in slowly heating world. And we think there are tonnes of opportunities to make great investments that will deliver brilliant returns in a sustainable way for our savers.

So that's the other bit of of this kind of jigsaw, is making sure that in the real guts of the organization, in that kind of asset management side, when we're looking after people's pension funds, that we're doing it in a way that is both responsible but also make sure they get the best returns that we can for them. So that's really important part of the kind of overall equation as well. That's a lot of the conversations we have with government, the influence we want to have, is around creating the right frameworks for us to be able to do that as well. That's part of a huge part of the kind of advocacy work that we do as well.

They're both enormous purpose led missions, aren't they? And weaving them together. And and then the I guess the last part of the jigsaw is how they then weave down into the individual brands. And you mentioned to me before about your concept of well, I'll let you describe it. Know exactly what I'm gonna say.

So when we looked at the brand strategy, and there's broadly speaking, there's there's sort of four architecture option, brand architecture options that you can have, and I mean there's variations, but but but there's four kind of key archetypes that you can have. You can either have a kind of monolithic brand architecture. I worked at Royal Mail, that was it. I mean it did have Parcelforce which was quite small but but it was predominantly one great big brand. So you either go monolithic or you kind of have a kind of sub brand architecture, bit like Virgin is probably a good way of doing that. So a lot of franchises that all are Virgin Trains, Virgin Money, Virgin this, Virgin that.

You can have an endorser brand strategy where you have kind of, you know, here is this individual customer brand but it is part of this bigger group, or you can have a kind of prolific strategy which you tend to get in FMCG where you have hundreds of brands but they're not connected together at all. When we looked at our brand strategy and our enterprise strategy and go right what are we going to do here?

An endorsed brand strategy felt like the right thing for us to do. We weren't going to transition everything over to standard life and rebrand us out or rebrand everything as Phoenix. That didn't seem that was desirable.

It was also very very very very expensive and would take an exceedingly long time to do it.

Yes yeah.

Could work out the cost but working out the benefits was really quite hard actually.

And we didn't want to be at the other end this page, we didn't want to have a whole series of independent brands because we wanted to have a single employer brand so everyone knew who they worked for that was purpose led and was doing brilliant things. We thought that was much more important than having individual brands that recruited to them with different terms and conditions and stuff like that which is much more efficient and effective to kind of do it under one brand.

And also there's twelve million customers within Phoenix Group across all of our brands and a degree of connectivity between them effectively gives us customer access so that we can cross sell.

So an endorsed brand strategy is really there to kind of have that kind of connective tissue between the brands so you're able to introduce brands to each other, which we thought was much more sensible than having everything completely independent and then trying to work out on earth we're gonna cross sell, given that we had all these customers already.

Enormous commercial benefits, but also tying into the benefits from the purpose driven objectives of the business as well.

So once we'd landed on, we're gonna have this endorsed brand strategy, so it's gonna be Standard Life part of Phoenix Group, Sun Life part of Phoenix Group, the same for ReAssure, same for Phoenix Life.

Just having a kind of a line under a logo, you know, has fairly weak effects.

That's not going to be enough. There needs to be much more of the kind of master brand infusing itself into those brands.

So we came up with the concept of the kind of the brand tuning fork. So you have at the bottom you have Phoenix, and that represents the kind of the spirit and the purpose and the values of the organisation.

And you move up that tuning fork into the different brands. They take those bits of DNA and they translate them into their market. And sometimes brands get this wrong. I think Unilever have been criticised for getting this wrong, have purpose led mayonnaise.

I don't need standard life to kind of position itself in the same way that Phoenix Group is, but I do need it to be resonant with what it is that we're doing. I want to give them the flexibility so that they can win in their market, but that there is a golden thread between how they behave, how they show up, the propositions, the service quality that that that links back to our our central purpose as an organization. The same for Sun Life, which is in the protection market quite different.

I may have got this wrong, forgive me if I have, but the six elements that you used in the original branding Yeah.

The attributes.

Work, the attributes which were guiding you, would are these the sort of how those attributes is how each individual brand should also fit into those?

But I mean slightly different things for them depending on the market that they're servicing.

Yep. Yep.

Makes complete So they're not sub brands, right?

I want them to have the flexibility to be able to win in their market and be able to kind of, you know, pivot the way they need to, there are a set of ground rules around kind of because we are a purpose led organisation with these values and these attributes.

And so that's really important that gets embedded in their propositions, in their positioning, and when you add it all up and you line all the brands next door to them, you kind of go yeah this is coherent now, this kind of works.

And also what we start to do through that programme is introduce our family of brands.

That you know we can introduce Standard Life to Phoenix Life or ReAssure customers through our kind of CRM programs and all the rest of it. And that's again really important commercially that we're able to do that.

And each of those brands can leverage where it's valuable to them what the master brand is doing around purpose or around sustainability and kind of climate change. It's not mandatory. If it's not valuable to them, don't leverage it. But if it really helps you know, so say in a b to b environment for standard life where, you know, they know they're gonna be selling to, I know, master trusts and trustees and through employee benefit consultants.

If it's important to them for prospects that are kind of horizon scanning and just thinking about change, it's probably important that Phoenix turns up where those people are getting their information and talks about, you know, the things that we're doing to kind of really improve the industry and kind of, you know, our financial strength and all those bits.

That's probably quite important so that when they go, oh yeah Standard part of them, oh we'll have them on the specialist.

You know I mean?

There's real value to be had in that, which Standard Life, it's not a plc, it wouldn't be able to do that on its own. So it's but it's important that the corporate brand turns up in those places in a complementary way.

Fascinating. It's I feel like we've been given an absolute masterclass in brand strategy, and just to to wrap us up, I want to just jump out slightly wider, if I may, into into marketing more broadly, and then and then bring it back again to the to the audience that we're that listens, tunes into the podcast. So I'm keen to get you know, you've had a fascinating career from multitude of agencies working with some of the largest brands in the world in financial services.

I wonder if you can reflect back on your career with the aim of looking forward to see how you see the role of marketing in general evolving within financial services marketing industry.

I think one of my biggest observations is that marketing a service is very different from selling a product, and I think sometimes FS marketers forget that. It's very easy to fall into the vernacular of, you know, what a FMCG brand would do.

But actually, experience, the things that we are doing are are really important because none of our products are particularly tangible. They're intangible. So the service experience, the journeys, the touch points, massively important to kind of reinforce what your brand is and how it's perceived. I think that's sometimes underestimated, but the the the best sort of financial services marketers absolutely get that.

And that's and and that's that that that is really important because it means you've got much more of a kind of surround sound to the brand work that you're doing. It's really about an experience, much more than it is just an ad or an app or a single customer journey. It's everything.

The entirety, yeah.

It's the whole way you show up. And that makes it hard because you have to be able to draw a line and say well there's only so much I can focus on to actually make a difference. So I think that ability to prioritise the highest value touch points and going right, what is the experience there and how do I make it positive and memorable is really important.

But this isn't a criticism of FS actually because I think this is true for for lots of other categories. We do tend to get quite product focused and not and not think about the overall brand experience that we wanna have because we're desperate to talk about this new product that somebody can buy that will do x y and z.

That of course is important at a part of the sales cycle.

It's probably not the most important thing to draw people in though unless they're ready to buy right now.

We talked about this initially on that when we talk about the benefits ladder and you have a kind of feature benefits and product benefits and emotional benefits at the at the top. And if you can get closer to the emotional benefits then that's, I guess that's more the experience that you're referring to.

Yeah, think that's right. Mean there's a lovely example actually, I mean this is years ago now, remember NatWest, they ran an ad on this actually, but they had a brilliant service which actually probably most banks do, but NatWest was the only one to talk about at the time. Because if you lose your bank card, can phone up and they'll give you a one time only code and you can go to a cash machine, you can get some money out.

Right. Very useful.

And you think, god, that's really useful. Yeah. Yeah. I remember that. I was probably about fifteen years old now. I remember that much more than I remember anything about product marketing that they've they've talked about because it's something it's like a it's like a, I don't know, a digital proposition.

Yeah. Stored it and thought I may need that someday.

And it's just it's it's really powerful. Now will that make me change my bank account? No idea. Haven't really thought about it.

But the fact is I can recall it at a moment's notice. I can't recall anything else. I think our ability to identify and invest in experiences like that is increasingly important in a world where frankly all the products and the services are pretty much the same anyway. So that ability to differentiate is important.

And I guess I mean the one thing I learned at Mastercard which has stayed with me massively is that at Mastercard we couldn't differentiate, right? The whole point of our product was it was the same as Visa and the same as American Express. You know there's actually global rules that say it has to be the same otherwise people are gonna get very confused when they go to a point of purchase and they don't know what to do.

So when you work in a world where there is no product differentiation, how do you differentiate?

Well you've got to come up with a personality, you've got to come up with an expression, you've got to come up with a bit of emotional connection, and you're gonna have to really own that and reinforce it. Obviously, know, the guys at Mastercard, you know, have absolutely done that and they've actually turned prices into product propositions.

Yeah.

I mean it's phenomenal what they've done the last fifteen I mean prices become part of culture really, isn't it?

It's huge. But when I worked on it, it was just an advertising campaign, which we then also activated through sponsorship. So you you create prices experiences, so whether that's player mascots for, you know, kids at, you know, Champions League finals or, or, you know, VIP areas for customers at the Brit Awards or or whatever. But they've taken it into such I mean, they've got like priceless restaurants now I think in in in in New York and, you know the thing they did, that amazing initiative around kind of true name, I mean just think about that from a kind of identity and fraud protection basis.

To create a payment vehicle if you are transgender so that you can have your true name on your card, but actually relates to a different identity and bank account. I mean, just get your head around that. It's an extraordinary thing, mean it's a brilliant thing to have done, and truly priceless for those people, but just the amount of hard work that must have gone into doing that around kind of identity verification and security and all the rest of it must be phenomenal. But yeah that's just I think I mean they are a bit of an outlier in terms of how they've done that, but I think the point is that you have to find points of distinctiveness so that you can really, you know, when you can't differentiate from a product perspective that you can be remembered and recalled and salient in that moment.

I think there's a lot of work to do there. Yeah there's a lot of work to do there. It's not just true of financial services, but I think in services world where you haven't got a product on a shelf, and increasingly there aren't places on the high street that you can go, it just lives in a digital world, there's a huge amount that has to be done there.

Thank you so much for giving and sharing some some of your wisdom built up over the years. I mean, is that is an absolute masterclass in in brands. So, yeah, very very grateful. I've learned an enormous amount, and I'm sure everyone listening or watching what I've done as well. So thank you for being so generous.

Oh, it's been a real pleasure, Jack, to you.

Thank you for listening today to The Growth Engine. If you enjoyed this episode and like to hear more, please do subscribe wherever you get your podcasts from and follow us on LinkedIn for regular updates or on www.hubagency.co.uk Thank you and see you next time.