Chief customer and innovation officer, Santander
Saj Arshad joined Santander in August 2020, bringing with him more than 30 years of experience in customer, marketing and digital transformation from brands including Bupa, Vodafone and American Express.
Arshad’s primary focus at Santander is driving customer engagement and innovation across all of the bank’s customer journeys as consumers increasingly shift to digital banking, which now accounts for more than two-thirds of the bank’s transactions.
Santander’s ‘Bank of Antanddec’ campaign won the Bronze award in the Finance category at the annual Effie awards in 2020. The campaign is credited with increasing mortgage applications by 24% - the best year for mortgages Santander has ever had - growing the bank’s market share by a percentage point and delivering record scores for brand love.
Santander continued to invest in customer-centric technologies in 2020 and launched its My Money Manager tool in October, which uses artificial intelligence to help people spot their spending habits and give them greater financial control. The platform has since signed up more than 1 million new users and delivered over 4 million personalised insights.■
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Saj Arshad
Chief marketing officer, Confused.com
Samuel Day took on the top marketing job at Confused.com in 2018 and has since been focused on rebuilding the brand through customer insight and taking a long-term view. Key to implementing Day’s brand-building strategy has been educating internal stakeholders on the principles of marketing, explaining how the process works in “rational terms” and “inspiring confidence”, as well as using extensive consumer insight and research to show as many data points as possible.
Day has been working to “inject warmth” into the brand and 2020 marked a shift in focus for Confused.com’s marketing, which replaced Brexit and fake news for the light-hearted confusions of everyday life. The company saw revenue increase by almost 20% last year, while profit rose by more than 40% for the second year in a row.
The business is now focused on keeping efficiency and effectiveness in balance, with Day ensuring the brand keeps monitoring and testing to understand where it is “most comfortable” on the effectiveness scale. “The danger is if you focus on efficiency then you don’t know what you’re missing out on,” he said.■
Samuel
Day
FINANCIAL SERVICES
Managing director of marketing and digital, Direct Line Group
Direct Line’s marketing has undergone a pivotal shift under Mark Evans’s leadership. Last year the business replaced one of its most effective brand campaigns, ‘The Fixer’, with ‘We’re on it’, a move it hoped would build salience around the Direct Line brand and position the insurer as more proactive.
The shift of focus from product to brand paid off. Nine months into the new campaign Direct Line’s internal data showed it was already 20% more effective than The Fixer at driving sales, despite lockdown hitting just weeks after it was launched.
Evans believes sticking with Direct Line’s core campaigns has helped it remain relevant to consumers during the pandemic. While its customer interactions are largely skewed towards digital channels, Evans is a “digitally conservative” marketer and invests relatively little in social and display advertising compared to traditional media channels.
Evans is also an executive sponsor for the BAME element of Direct Line’s diversity and inclusion activity and a Fellow of The Marketing Society and The Marketing Academy.■
Mark Evans
Chief marketing officer, NatWest Group
Margaret Jobling took on the top marketing job at NatWest Group last summer, tasked with making the group more relevant to consumers and becoming a “relationship bank”.
Jobling has been focusing on bringing the company’s new purpose-led strategy to life, championing the potential of people, families and businesses, with the aim of becoming more sustainable. This has also meant finding ways to improve marketing effectiveness and enhance the customer experience, a push recently backed with a £1bn investment.
Key to this has been harnessing the opportunity to do something that “humanises banking” and makes it more relatable and understandable to customers. In March, NatWest unveiled a major campaign and new creative platform to empower its customers to take control of their finances. “Purpose for me is your North Star as a business, that really drives your decision every day,” said Jobling.
In spite of a difficult year, the group’s net promoter scores (NPS) have improved year on year, with the NatWest brand’s NPS rising from 4 to 7 during the fourth quarter and the Royal Bank of Scotland's rising from -16 to -9.■
Margaret Jobling
Group brand and reputation director, Aviva
Raj Kumar was promoted to group brand and reputation director of Aviva in 2019 and has since been working to position the financial services brand as one that is in genuine service of the customer and the go-to brand in a busy marketplace.
Kumar has been looking to “weaponise” the brand to give it more commercial and emotional impact. He led Aviva through a high profile brand relaunch and repositioning in April, which was marked by Aviva’s biggest brand campaign in five years. ‘It Takes Aviva’ looks to show the company in a more confident light while also putting the customer at the centre of the brand.
“It’s about making sure that we are that empathetic voice, but also an optimistic one,” said Kumar, who is also a Fellow of The Marketing Society and a non-executive director of the Prince’s Teaching Institute and Swim England.
Aviva posted its highest first quarter insurance sales for a decade this year and was the third most famous insurance brand in the UK in the second quarter of 2021, according to YouGov.■
Raj Kumar
Director, brands and marketing, Metro Bank
Jessica Myers became Metro Bank’s first ever marketing director at the end of 2019. Since then, she has built the team from five customer communications specialists to a department of 35 marketers and has launched the bank’s first brand campaign, ‘People-people banking’. It is part of her strategy to drive brand awareness nationally, give the bank a platform to communicate its customer experience and differentiate it from rivals in the sector.
Myers then launched Metro Bank’s first business brand campaign in June to highlight the resilience of small businesses in the UK during the pandemic. It was based on a year’s worth of customer data and insight, and designed to build the brand and awareness, as well as drive incremental growth and revenue.
Myers has also been working to cement the relationship between the marketing and finance departments, with a clear focus on effectiveness and working to deliver business objectives. “Marketing and finance teams need to work hand-in-hand because marketing is about delivering growth and revenues, so how can we make sure we are seen investing in the business? We are not a cost centre,” she said.■
Jessica Myers
Chief marketing officer, Habito
Abba Newbery leads the brand, PR, corporate communications and growth functions for disruptive fintech brand Habito, which is one of the fastest-growing online mortgage brokers in the UK.
Newbery has been making a concerted effort to reflect the “hell, stress and confusion” of mortgages in Habito’s advertising. At the start of the year she led the startup through a full rebrand - including a new logo, website and user experience - which was designed to symbolise the brand’s fight against “mortgage hell” by portraying a “stunningly badass version of heaven” instead.
Habito has also launched an erotic novel this year in partnership with the writer of My Dad Wrote a Porno. Aimed at homebuyers dealing with mortgage stress, the novel is a product of Habito’s own research that revealed the negative impact the mortgage process was having on people’s relationships and intimacy. All proceeds from the novel are being donated to the Terrence Higgins Trust.
Habito is increasingly making moves to ensure it is using its business as a force for good and last year became the first mortgage company in the UK to gain B Corp accreditation.■
Abba Newbery
Chief marketing officer, Barclays UK
Stephen Vowles joined Barclays in 2018, bringing with him more than 30 years of marketing experience from brands including Argos, Ladbrokes and Sainsbury’s.
Vowles spearheaded the launch of a major new strategic and creative platform for Barclays at the start of 2021, which was kickstarted by the bank’s ‘Master your Moneyverse’ campaign to encourage customers to take control of their finances and promote its mobile banking app.
Barclays teamed up with charity Age UK last August to offer assistance to older people who have been hit hardest by the coronavirus pandemic. In addition to making a donation to Age UK as part of its wider Covid-19 Community Age Package, Barclays staff took part in the charity’s Telephone Friendship service.
In spite of the challenging year, Barclays remained profitable every quarter during 2020 and delivered a full group profit before tax of £3.1bn. Profit more than doubled during the first quarter of 2021, while the Barclays brand was the most famous UK consumer bank in the second quarter of 2021 on YouGov and the fourth most popular.■
Stephen Vowles
Chief product and marketing officer, Nationwide
Sara Bennison believes marketers should stop focusing on being ‘perfect’ and instead be ready to change plans and take risks. She says being rigorous about the long-term vision is key to being flexible in the short term, and that taking an approach focused on outcomes rather than rigid plans is what helps to drive businesses forward and build the credibility of the marketing function.
Nationwide has had to put this flexibility and agility to the test many times over the past year, which is testament to the strength of its creative vehicle. Ready to launch a new campaign when the UK went into lockdown last March, Nationwide chose to donate the airtime to long-time partner Shelter instead.
The building society was forced to think on its feet again in January when the UK announced a third lockdown, prompting Nationwide to axe its original plan and launch its ‘Saving for a Sunny Day’ ad in under four weeks, which is part of its long-running ‘Voices’ campaign.
“Being a slave to a plan can make you seem gloriously out of touch at the moment,” Bennison said.■
Sara Bennison
Head of brand, Starling Bank
Rachel Kerrone has been leading the marketing for Starling Bank during a period of rapid growth, which has seen the digital challenger bank double its accounts to 2 million since the Covid-19 pandemic began last March.
Kerrone’s primary focus has been on driving consideration and awareness for the brand, as well as increasing trust with consumers and persuading people to switch their bank.
Starling continued to run TV advertising in 2020 as part of its ‘Helping Britain Fly’ activity, and has this year launched a campaign to highlight its customer experience and a social media campaign to better target disabled consumers. It is also aiming to be the first brand to advertise on electric car charging terminals to reflect its own efforts to reduce its carbon footprint.
Starling Bank’s brand awareness score has increased by 3.8 points to 42.4 over the past year, according to YouGov’s BrandIndex, while figures from the Current Account Switch Service show Starling Bank was one of the most switched-to UK banks of 2020, topping the table during the second quarter with just under 12,000 net switches.■
Rachel Kerrone
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How marketers can win the struggle to hit sales targets
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How marketers can win the struggle to hit sales targets
The future of one-to-one personalisation in the age of machine learning
How brands can control their data destiny
webinars on Marketing Leadership
Sponsored by Salesforce