Reflection - Storytelling

Challenge

Foreign nationals moving to the UK for professional, academic or personal reasons, who financial  institutions are eager to acquire as customers and serve to the full, have the same offers /  opportunities and burdens across competitors in the market.  This makes hard for any single financial  institution to stand out so to attract and engage them at an early stage.

However, offerings are highly affected by regulatory and practical constraints that leave little room  for products and services’ improvement and to developing valid differentiators in the market place.   Hence, the main challenge remains to attract the audience with an undifferentiated offer, to intercept  their needs early on and entice them enough to become customers to then establish a long standing  relationship for future developments.

The market data provides strong basis to pursue this business with high potential for greater market  share and future business growth within the affluent customers’ targeted segment.

Selection

The tool I chose is the storytelling as this will deliver a two folds’ benefit. It will provide the deeper  insight and understanding we need to bring different elements to what we have and don’t have in the  proposition currently available and shift focus on what really matters to prospects / future customers  with an understanding of their deep needs, sentiment and personal story, which will form the core of  the business goals’ activities.  This will help also to build the business case with the top management  who’ll need to support the future plan.

To do this first and foremost we must get to know the audience, deeply and thoroughly and  understand what would bring that element(s) to hit the mark through alternative routes, vs tackling  the offering as it stands.  And I believe that storytelling will help us do that.

We’ll need to gather essential part of the story where the emotional, social and functional needs  unfold and reveal themselves for what they really are in given circumstances.  This will help identify  the opportunities to become a trusted point of reference for this segment.

Application

To start gathering insight I organised some (3-5) round tables of small groups of people (5-8), from  different nationalities within the age group, background and status of interest within the parameters  of our target audience.  Questions are mainly prompts for open discussion where sticky notes are  distributed to collect input and to cluster themes.  The conversation is guided so that we go through  the process customers followed before, during and after moving to the new country, assessing the  needs (functional, emotional and social) and the path they took.

One to one interviews (with about 20 people) which allow for more personal and deeper  conversations, provided us with the granularity of information we need to revert back to the initial  clustering (input collected through the round tables) to check the mapping of findings and to cross  reference circumstances and needs throughout the customers’ journey.

Insight and Approach

By using this tool, we were able to grasp the common needs and expectations based on the shared  sentiment in a specific point in time – how that can help the audience in the transition and therefore  how the brand / company / institution becomes a strong ally for the present and the future needs of  these people.  It also allows to exploit what we take from customers’ input and “translate” it into plain  language that relates to them and their stories, connecting them with the brand by seeing the  solution to their needs in a brand/company / institution that understands and fully comprehends  expectations by anticipating the response.

The interview techniques and round tables, coupled with market data, have provided both hard facts  and valuable insight to also bring on-board the top management who must support activities in order  to succeed.  In particular, the Storytelling tool enabled us to find the most powerful part of the  message, adding colour to the strategy and proving that we can gain mkt share with the same “offer”  whilst addressing the audience in the right way.  Recommendations on the narrative and the  communications at large have strong foundations, proving very successful to align front line staff with  senior management, creating a common understanding, accessible to all.

I trust the storytelling is the best tool to dig deeper, to gain true insight and formulate proposals  around the “reality” of lives with a good story designed to make them connect with the brand – with a  language and a narrative that they understand and identify with, particularly in a specific moment in  time (i.e. circumstances) which we can only investigate through immersion and sound understanding.

We gathered valuable vision on how to hit the mark by discovering where is the connection with the  brand and how to share awareness through the channel, language and manner that speak to the  audience we’re trying to reach.

