Editor’s note: Tim Brunwin is principal ad hoc research manager, customer research and market insights at U.K-based TSB Bank. Kelly McKnight is head of trends at Manchester, U.K.-based marketing research firm Join the Dots.
TSB Bank was created to bring more competition to U.K. banking. The company’s mission is to be a real challenger to the big banks and to ultimately make banking better for all U.K. consumers. With around 5 million customers, TSB works to listen to the people and offer the products and services they need.
Before launching a new product and campaign, TSB looked to take a deep dive into the vast amount of specialist knowledge and consumer feedback held within the bank, while also ensuring that the team fully understood current consumer trends and how they might impact those products. This was done to help ensure that new products and campaigns will be rooted in customer insight and customer truths.
One of TSB’s key strategic pillars is “Borrow Well” – helping people to borrow well either through a mortgage, loan or credit card. This research project was developed to inform this important part of the business as the product teams looked to refresh and relaunch lending products.
TSB wanted to review and distill all existing customer and market insight around its lending products (and the whole area of borrowing in general) to help develop the most appropriate new products and to inform future marketing and proposition development. It was important for TSB to get an external view – to have a fresh pair of eyes look at all the information.
The brief for the research project was to identify universal customer truths around attitudes to lending that could be used to inform the Borrow Well strategy in 2017 and beyond. It was put together in conjunction with the Borrow Well team. A number of marketing research companies were asked to pitch and Join the Dots was chosen as the research partner due to its level of consumer understanding, owing to its specialist trends team.
A wealth of data
Internally, TSB’s insights, product and marketing teams were sitting on a wealth of data around borrowing – both in terms of knowledge from previous consumer research studies and specialist knowledge and learnings held within the company’s experienced teams.
As we have already said, any new product or campaign needs to be rooted in customer insight and we knew that a number of key truths and insights would be buried in the data.
The research project, which was completed over a two-month period of intensive work, involved the following:
· Desk research to review 20customer and consumer primary research reports from various parts of the business. These included qualitative and quantitative studies that had been used to help support previous new product development and to track customer satisfaction.
· Desk research to review data from across thebusiness. This included industry reports and internal strategy documents to allow Join the Dots to access the most up-to-date information available on consumers’ lives now and forecast future changes and trends.
· Stakeholder interviews with product specialists in the loans, mortgage and credit card teams. These interviews ensured that all the knowledge held by the various members of the TSB team in different departments was captured and then filtered through to the project team.
· Trends overlay – the trends and macro factors which are influencing consumers’ behavior in relation to the financial world were looked at. Join the Dots identified five truths from the primary findings – about the way people behave; their attitudes toward their finances and borrowing; and their needs.
The team then used trends knowledge to contextualize these behaviors in order to better understand why people think and behave in a particular way.
· Acreative workshop followed an internal debrief of the report. This allowed the teams to bring together members of TSB’s product, marketing and insight teams as well as external marketing agencies. A streamlined version of the report highlighting a potential big idea was presented.
We all took part in two exercises which took the big idea and applied it to real-world situations, using three different personas created to represent different types of typical customers.
Organizing and presenting the findings
This project was about bringing together existing knowledge and expertise, research and information, collating the findings to produce a single source for customer insight about borrowing which could be accessed by all relevant parties at the bank.
Having collated all the strands of information into a coherent end, Join the Dots’ final presentation brought to life the key findings using consumer research, competitor review and trend data, supported by the latest thinking on consumer motivations, and crystallized this narrative into a big idea to inform future strategy. The creative workshop distilled all of the key learnings.
Having worked together to create the consumer profiles and personas, the borrower types were brought to life and introduced to the TSB team. Join the Dots also produced an infographic which was made into posters for internal display, providing a visual reminder of the consumer truths identified through the research.
Although TSB already held vast amounts of information around credit cards, loans, mortgages and other lending products, through the desk research and stakeholder interviews, Join the Dots was able to pull together a compelling narrative which was then further enhanced by the trends overlay.
Identifying trends
The project confirmed a lot of what TSB already knew which, when you are developing new products or campaigns, is extremely reassuring!
We were also able to identify several common trends around what are a diverse range of product areas. There are some universal truths around borrowing, no matter what the product is. One of the key findings was that people wanted flexibility from TSB’s products and services. We were aware of this need but the research confirmed that it is fundamental for consumers.
The insights identified are now being used to inform the communication and product strategies for the new Borrow Well campaign, which was launched at the beginning of 2017. Anyone who has seen the campaign will know that flexibility is a key message.