Rachael Rowe: Welcome to today’s Seismic Session. Today we’re going to be talking about the evolution of brand in financial services.
I’m joined, as always, by my co host, Gemma Livermore, head of FS Marketing for our international business.
Gemma Livermore: Hi, Rachael. Good to be here again.
Rachael Rowe: Good to see you, Gemma. Also joined by Alanna Nensel, Global Head of Brand, Creative and Digital at Janus Henderson.
Hi, Alanna.
Alanna Nensel: Hi. Thanks for having me today.
Rachael Rowe: Thanks for being here. And Maddie Albon. Brand manager at Peel Hunt. Good to have you here Maddie.
Maddie Albon : Good to have you here in our podcast studio.
Rachael Rowe: Absolutely. And this is, this is an exciting one for us because we’re actually at Peel Hunt’s podcast studios today. So, uh, thanks for hosting us.
Maddie Albon : It’s all right. It’s good to all be in person chatting.
Gemma Livermore: Yeah, lovely. It makes a real difference.
Maddie Albon : Yeah.
Rachael Rowe: So, to kick things off, as our regular listeners will know, we usually start by thinking about what FS, enabling FS, means to them. So, if I could start with you Maddie, what does enabling financial services mean to you?
Maddie Albon : I think that enabling financial services, especially in my role, is, yeah, definitely about the efficiency. Things move so fast, when you work in marketing. I think there’s always so much to keep up with. You’re across all the different business areas. You’ve always got so much to do, so , finding the most efficient way to do things, is very important and crucial to this role because, there’s always so much on.
Rachael Rowe: Excellent. Thanks for sharing that, Maddie. And Alanna, if I could come to you, what does enabling financial services mean?
Alanna Nensel: Yeah, thanks. If I look at it in my role, which is how I will sort of tackle that, in my role, I’m thinking about how can I enable my colleagues at Janus Henderson to better serve our clients.
So I’m thinking, they actually talk a lot about brand being air cover. So the sales teams will say, I need air cover. I need someone to know who Janus Henderson is when I walk into an office, because that’s going to make my job so much easier.
Gemma Livermore: I like that way of looking at it.
Alanna Nensel: Mm hmm. I do too. So I’m thinking about air cover.
We’re trying to give them the tools they need so that they can spend their time doing what they do best, right? So we’re trying to minimise busy work, minimise difficulties so that they can be thinking about, everyone in the firm can be thinking about, how could we be doing this better for our clients?
So if we’re doing our jobs, we’re doing that.
Maddie Albon : Think that’s a lot about like automation as well, trying to create as creators in this industry, finding those ways to automate a lot of things, especially when it comes to branding, and minimising their time being spent on those like, little details that they shouldn’t even be thinking about.
Alanna Nensel: Exactly, and so, so that, because the value of the human, right, is our ability to think strategically and think analytically about things. And we have, we just don’t have enough time to do that. And yet that’s probably where we’re adding the most value in our jobs and in building relationships, right? So the salespeople are thinking about building relationships with clients if they’re spending all their time, like writing out their notes from a call with a client.
That’s a waste of their time. Yeah, that is not using their relationship skills
Gemma Livermore: Or even preparing beforehand.
Alanna Nensel: That’s right, or all the prep beforehand. The more we can, to Maddie’s point, automate that, make that easier for them take away the little details So they’re spending time on the like sort of highest value add.
Gemma Livermore: Yeah,
Alanna Nensel: That’s when we’re succeeding.
Gemma Livermore: I love the fact that your sales team is seeing branding as airtime. That they’re seeing it as part of their role, because that’s actually a hurdle. I think for a lot of people is for the sales team to understand the value of branding and the fact that seeing that value already, I think it’s fantastic.
Alanna Nensel: I think that’s right. And I, I agree with you. It’s not a given. But I do feel that our sales teams that at Janus Henderson really do feel the value of brand and kind of want more of it and love it. And they think that it makes their job easier if our brand is stronger. So that’s great.
Gemma Livermore: I love that.
Rachael Rowe: I do too. And I love the idea of the value of the human. I think that that’s a bigger discussion there that maybe we will get into a little bit later on as well. We like to frame our podcast using Seismic terminology.
So in the first phase, we’ll talk a little bit about the tremors. About how this movement started within brand. Then we’ll get on to the epicentre. So what the world today looks like and how brand has evolved. And then we’ll start to look at the future. So we’ll think a little bit about the Aftershocks.
So what’s coming next? And how do we see brand evolving? And I guess that is probably where we’ll unpack a little bit more of the human element and what that will mean in the world of AI etcetera. So something to think about for a little bit later on. So let’s start first of all, with the tremors. Here, I guess we’re looking at the evolution that you’ve seen, historically within your role or maybe even looking further back and how you’ve seen that change, over the years to where we are today.
So if I could start maybe with Maddie, how have you seen brand evolve in your role at Peel Hunt?
Maddie Albon : I think over the last five years at Peel Hunt that I’ve been here, I have seen branding change so much. Even in my role, I actually joined as a graphic designer and I was the first graphic designer or someone similar in my role.
And before that, we outsourced to an individual to do our branding, graphic design, et cetera. So I would say that the branding and the whole brand presence wasn’t as strong and it was outsourced. And then because I came in house, and started as a graphic designer, I have seen such a change, especially in my role.
I was doing the graphic design and then I moved into being a brand manager and that is because it’s started, I feel like I look more into like the strategy and it’s not just about how things look, it’s about, yeah, the strategy, how people see the brand and there’s always so much to be looked at.
Gemma Livermore: Did you feel like, the company owned the brand more when you brought it in house?
Maddie Albon : Yeah, definitely. I’ve, yeah, I’ve seen, cause we had an old brand and we went through a rebrand process, in 2021. So that was really interesting seeing the shift.
Before it was very, old and like regal feeling and now we’ve shifted more into a bit more modern techy feel and then also having to apply that brand to everything. We’ve seen growth also by having a podcast studio, the need for podcast and video and having more accessible forms of content.
I think people are straying away, not everyone, but like you need those other platforms to keep up
Gemma Livermore: I know we had this conversation off air just before the podcast. For our listeners, could you just explain about the podcast room that we’re sitting in now and what you’ve done with that?
Because I think it’s such an interesting story of how you’ve created this multi channel brand, if you like.
Maddie Albon : Yes. So our research team, they produce research notes and they also produce podcasts and videos to go alongside the research notes. So when a research note gets published, sometimes there’s a video or a podcast so that people can listen to or view these interesting highlights about like a company or about one of their sector outlooks. So I think it’s a really interesting great way to do it and our podcast studio, well Digital Media Designer, Gabriel, who’s in the background here.
He is great at putting together all these videos, so
Gemma Livermore: I love that, and I think that’s what I’ve seen in my career is that change from brand being a logo, a colour and very regal and formal to actually being more inclusive and, you know, thinking about how different people will absorb your brand, whether it be a podcast, a video, you know, something in writing, and giving that, um, multichannel aspect.
I think it’s fantastic. I’ve really seen that change when I look back at the tremors.
Rachael Rowe: I think it’s really interesting as well. The way you’ve described the journey for brand to become more of a strategic lever and to be recognised as a strategic lever in the business. And as you talked about touching different parts of the organisation as well.
So it’s not just a marketing tool, but it’s actually something that everyone in the organisation recognises
Gemma Livermore: It’s that everyone feeling like they are the brand. I think that’s where we want to get to in the future. And I remember back in the beginning of my career, you didn’t have any touch points with the brand.
Rachael Rowe: And oftentimes we hear about authenticity within financial services, don’t we? And it’s about the, the brand authentically representing what the business is and what the business stands for. So I’d be really interested coming to you, Alanna, to understand how you’ve seen the evolution of brand.
And maybe dig in a little bit to, you know, what, what’s kind of caused the change that we’ve, we’ve seen over the recent years.
Alanna Nensel: Yep, I’m happy to do that. And I have to clarify, they see our brand as air cover, which is actually, sort of, a wartime reference. So just view it in the brightest, happiest way, but they view it as cover for them to go in and do what they need to do.
Yeah. So yeah, so I’ve been doing this for a really long time. So when I thought about this question, I started laughing because, I think brand in the very old and olden days when I started, was really kind of your visual identity and like your logo and maybe a tagline.
And that was your brand. And that was the whole conversation.
Like there wasn’t a whole lot more to it than that. And the way that you used your brand was mostly in print. So, you know, I remember when the biggest prank you could pull on someone in your office was to rush into their office after they’d push the print button on a hundred thousand piece run and say, did you see the typo?
You fixed the typo, right? And then they would freak out and then you’d say, no, there’s no typo. Um, or maybe like really nice people didn’t do that and just that. But,
Gemma Livermore: I definitely did. did that,
Alanna Nensel: um,
And that, you know, because everything was done in print and. You know, we didn’t have social media yet. You maybe had a basic website, but it was just brochureware, right? Yeah. It wasn’t actually an interactive tool. and I think to your question about what has made it change, it’s really digital. Yeah. Everything digital has kind of made it all change. So print is really, it’s still used in some ways, but much less. I think, um, to Maddie’s point, like you’re looking at how can we apply this digitally and what needs, what works best for that instead of what used to work best for whatever we did before. So it’s added all this flexibility.
You don’t worry about your typo on your 100, 000 piece print run anymore.
But now it’s incredibly crowded. So how can your brand cut through in a super crowded digital space that everyone is accessing because actually it’s much easier to do some of the digital stuff than it was to do giant brochure runs. I remember also, back in the day, the way you would achieve cut through was to send something really interesting in the mail.
Yeah. I think no one’s really doing that. Right. So you’d send an invite to an event and it would be like a 3D kind of pop up invite, and you’d send it in a box, and that would be really interesting to open, and you’d get really excited.
Gemma Livermore: See, I still love post. I feel like there’s maybe still a channel for that
Rachael Rowe: There’s a role for post
Alanna Nensel: Well, it’s almost boomeranging, right? So everybody went digital,
Then you figured out it’s really hard to cut through because everybody’s online and everybody’s got a website and everybody’s got a, you know, LinkedIn page.
And so I think brands are actually coming back around to go, everyone stopped doing print. Actually, we could do something interesting.
Gemma Livermore: Yeah. The only issue with post now is that we’re in this hybrid world where you can’t ask people for their home address and you can’t send it to their office.
Maddie Albon : I also do think that, during COVID, everyone stopped printing and that’s when we saw a lot more digital stuff happening. And now we are, you know, doing a bit more, print things And I still think nothing beats the feeling of having like a nice booklet in your hands to skim through. People love taking something physical, you know, like into meetings and everything.
So I think there still is a need for both and just finding what works for what you’re actually doing.
Alanna Nensel: We’re probably more likely to use something at an event, so someone could have something in their hands, and you’re not having to deal with the delivery issue. So we might print something nice or interesting or fun for an event.
Gemma Livermore: And, like, going back to your point at the beginning, Maddie, like, where you said the branding used to be quite regal, I think that was the case for a lot of companies in our industry. You know, to companies that hundreds of years old that carried this traditional look and feel. And I remember even, you know, there were only certain colours that you used and it was like your royal blues and you’re like deep Harrods greens because it was what was thought of as trustworthy.
And, you know, all of those things. And it was always avoid red because that means danger and stop. but That doesn’t seem to be the case so much now. Maybe it’s where it’s gone digital, that colours do look different when they’re online rather than in print
Maddie Albon : I think they look very different, yeah, in print versus online. There’s a lot of things sometimes we design for digital use and then if we have it printed, it just can look a bit different. So I think that’s one thing we always do keep in mind when we’re designing something, if it’s going to be printed and, and, online, they are different. I think you can do a bit more with digital, you can make it feel a bit more interesting, but then sometimes that doesn’t really translate into print very well.
Gemma Livermore: Do you think there’s any other reason though that that has changed within brand, that it’s gone from that very sort of traditional fonts and colours to what it is now?
Alanna Nensel: I will jump in on that and say, I think, I do think fonts have modernised and you, and you actually see maybe a, a range of fonts, but I think colours are something where, our industry mostly struggles to differentiate and use different colours. Blackrock actually came out and did it really well. You can see they basically, I think they tried to use all the colours that no one was using. So that it would, be differentiated and quite, different, kind of achieve some of that cut through.
And I think they’ve done a good job of that. But if you look across the space, lots of blue. Yeah, lots of blue. in our industry. And so you kind of go, we’re still like, kind of a little bit, and it does look good online too, right? So it looks good digitally. It looks good in print. You know, most people.
Gemma Livermore: Yeah,
Alanna Nensel: Feels kind of traditional. Feels safe, it’s not offensive.
So I sort of look across and see a lot of blue still, in especially in our, in our industry because it feels so sort of safe.
Gemma Livermore: Do you feel like there’s a masculine side to using blue?
Alanna Nensel: Maybe,
Gemma Livermore: that’s something I’ve noticed is that it’s more inclusive now, branding, you know, in colours and everything. Whereas when you look back at branding, when I started it was all very masculine focused, and maybe that’s where the blue arose from. Who knows.
Rachael Rowe: I think more than that as well, it’s also masculine aspirations sometimes reflected in the branding historically.
So it’ll be interesting to see how that evolves as the wealth transfers into the hands, perhaps of a more diverse group. so I think this brings us quite neatly to the epicentre because we’ve already touched a little bit on cutting through and brand resonance and the brand promise. How do you make decisions about your brand reflecting the customer base or the client base that you’re looking to engage with?
And I think maybe if I start with you on that one, Alanna.
Alanna Nensel: So the way we’re organised at Janus Henderson is we have a centralised brand creative digital multimedia team. So, that all sits in my area and it’s considered a global corporate function. And we support all of the activity that happens around the farm.
And then outside of that, we actually are quite regionalised in our sales and marketing model. So, we’ve got regional heads of, North America, EMEA, LATAM, APAC, and Australia. And they have channel marketing heads in each of those regions. So that’s how we’re set up. So, when we’re making brand decisions, the decision ultimately will rest, and the execution ultimately will rest with my group.
But we want to make sure that we are taking into account the needs of all the different regions. They’re very different. The client bases are very different, and you have to tailor it. So we work really, really closely with our channel marketing teams in each region. I do very little without consulting with my channel marketing heads.
Maybe they are annoyed by the amount of emails they get from me. I don’t know. But we try to really, really bring them in when we’re thinking about brand strategy, any major brand decisions, even small brand decisions. We’re talking with them because the last thing you want is to appear tone deaf to a local market because you’re implementing some sort of central directive that you’ve decided is important.
Gemma Livermore: Yeah, and I think that local market piece is really important now we’ve become such a global industry, you know, the HSBC tagline always comes back to me, you know the local bank, but it’s true, isn’t it? You know, you can’t just have one global brand that goes everywhere and fits everywhere.
You have to look at how that will hit the local market, what it means to them and so on. Yeah.
Alanna Nensel: And how you, you know, maybe some of your core, I think in our, in our case, some of our core brand tenants are the same globally. So we have a purpose statement and a mission and a set of values. And we have a colour palette and fonts and a visual identity.
And that’s pretty much the same. But the way that we use it and the way we promote it is going to be different. So in some regions, social media is like their number one, right? They’re, they’re doing always on LinkedIn. Everything is social media. Super important for their market and other markets, the best lover for them is maybe advertising, right?
So they’re doing that. So it’s some of it is the how I think that you’ve tailor, but then also the messaging. So you might have your very top level, like your tagline is the same everywhere, but the campaign you’re running might be different. Yeah. Right.
Rachael Rowe: And I think a big challenge in that as well is making sure that you have control over the consistency of the brand, particularly if the brand is changing so that you’re sure that, your employees are using the brand that you have defined as your go to market brand, now.
Alanna Nensel: Yeah.
Rachael Rowe: So how, do you, approach that, Maddie?
Maddie Albon : Yeah, I think because we’re a smaller firm, like London is our main office. We’ve got a small office in New York and in Copenhagen as well. So we are a very tight knit firm. It is much easier to be able to talk to people and help them with their work.
Basically, I help 300 people on brand. We don’t really have, I guess our main brand, that’s all set. We’ve got Peel Hunt, the evolution of business but I think what I help a lot of people with, it’s the different departments. It will be, we have a lot of things kind of automated.
We’ve got like templates and everything that people can use. but a lot of things because we are a smaller firm can be a bit more bespoke. So everyone can kind of apply their own touch to things. We do like to see what everyone’s doing and, you know, just make sure everything is kind of kept in line.
But, I think that’s also a good thing. A good thing as well that people can apply their own touch to things and
Gemma Livermore: I think that’s something I’ve seen. in my career is that going back to the tremors, I know I’m going slightly off piste here, but I remember when people would like save a logo to their desktop and then reuse it somewhere in completely the wrong way.
Alanna Nensel: And like stretch it out and you’re like, that’s where did you get that?
Gemma Livermore: But you know, like now to your point, the fact that we can create templates and we can have that central source of truth, you know, so yes, you can personalise it, but here is what you need to use to make your own documents so that,. Yeah, they don’t stretch things.
Maddie Albon : And it also, yeah, saves them so much time as well when there’s the templates.
That’s basically, I feel like that’s one of my main jobs is making everything super easy for everyone to use so they, yeah, don’t have to be faffing around with those little things so that they can work on the actual content that’s in these pitch documents.
Gemma Livermore: And also I think taking that irritation piece out for them makes them want to use what you’ve created.
Yeah,
Alanna Nensel: What’s funny to think about too is, so Maddie your firm is a bit smaller, you’ve got, you know, a more, localised presence and we’re a bit, larger firm with more offices that I’m thinking about, but we’re using the same strategy. So I think that’s really interesting and hopefully helpful for anybody that’s listening that we do the same thing.
We’re trying to provide templates. We’re making everything centrally available. Here are your logos. Here’s the icons. Here’s the imagery that’s approved. you know, email signatures, even brand guidelines, team’s backdrops. It’s all in a central location because I don’t want them going and like, I don’t want them Saving the logo to their desktop and stretching it out and making it purple and whatever they’re going to do to it.
So you make everything available so that no one has to go and try to create things themselves because you don’t want that. You want them to use the same assets. So it’s the same strategy
Maddie Albon : I think no one wants to be starting from scratch for anything. Everyone wants the easiest, quickest way to be doing things.
Rachael Rowe: It’s really interesting because, I mean, as you know, we work with lots of organisations going through digital transformation within FS and the first thing that we find we need to do with our customers is help them control the chaos because they have so many versions of the same thing. So many kind of brand comes into that obviously, because then you have different logos in different places.
And how do you know what’s being shared? How do you know what’s being read?
How do you know that you’re consistent, you’re compliant, first of all?
Gemma Livermore: That’s a really important piece that’s moved from the now is actually seeing, you know, who’s used it? Because for me, I could create something amazing that I think is beautiful, but if nobody’s using it, you know, what’s, the point?
So, you know, is somebody actually opening it? Are they using it? Are they clicking on it? Is it doing what we I wanted it to do. And in this digital world, like when we think back to that print piece, Alanna like,
Alanna Nensel: We didn’t know
Gemma Livermore: We didn’t know if they walked out the room threw It in the bin.
Protecting the Brand – Part 1 Rachel: It was it was actually a lovely time, wasn’t it? Because we could just decide it was beautiful, and then that was it. But,
Gemma Livermore: We could tell ourselves it was beautiful, yeah.
Protecting the Brand – Part 1 Alanna: also.
Gemma Livermore: But you know, I think that’s, that’s also where you’ve seen the evolution of how things have changed is because you could see that things became tired or redundant or weren’t used anymore. You could try something new and go, wow, that really worked.
You know, people clicked on that and that’s something that we can then move towards. And I think Maddie, you put it beautifully with this multi channel side of things, you know, of recording documents that were previously having to be read through and then giving it in those different options to absorb. I think that.
That’s a fantastic side of where we are now when we look at the epicentre. Yeah,
Maddie Albon : And also with, the digital content, you can see the views of what’s being interacted with. And I find that quite interesting because the digital bits, if something’s not working, you can cut them and still have the base, so yeah, that’s quite interesting.
Rachael Rowe: And I guess coming on from that once once you have your brand, how do you protect it, particularly in this digital world? It’s created maybe more challenges in that respect. So, how do you approach that? Alanna if f I come to you for that one,
Alanna Nensel: So, couple things to think about there. One is protect it from people stretching my logo and making it purple. So that is a protection mechanism. So that’s where we make everything centrally available, and we just continually point people there. This is where you get your logos. This is where you, that’s a way of protecting it, right? So that they’re actually using things in the right way and not making it up themselves.
And then the second thing is we do spend some time thinking about like trademarks and looking at if you’re seeing, well now with AI, you’re actually seeing a whole bunch of impersonation pop up. I don’t know if everyone has been seeing that in their worlds, but we’re getting brand impersonators.
We’re getting portfolio manager impersonators saying, I’m a portfolio manager for Janus Henderson, so you should invest. in this way and it’s not them and it’s AI that is doing this. So we’re actually starting to think about brand protection in that way as well. as well as traditional, like legal trademarks and things like that.
But, the more practical one is actually just using the brand the way that we want it to be used and that’s this whole, like make everything centrally available and then just use that. Yeah. Single source of truth. That’s right.
Maddie Albon : Yeah. That’s sort of the main thing that we focus on as well. and also,
I do have the ability to be able to talk to everyone in the office that’s using it and just check in with them and I love helping people so I’m always like telling people like come to me if you have any questions or need any help with anything like always here to help. Always yeah pointing them to a centralised location
Rachael Rowe: Yeah, I think the single source of truth, the central location, is kind of key because that gives you the platform from which you can, you can grow and drive efficiency and do all the other great things that brand can bring. And then
Alanna Nensel: Yes, because I’m the opposite of Maddie. like don’t come to me. Don’t come to me. not gonna be able to get back to you. Go to there, go to there.
Protecting the Brand – Part 1 Gemma: or go
Rachael Rowe: And I think, you know, we managed to get a little bit of the way through the conversation before we started to talk. Talk about AI think it was inevitable that it would it would pop up at some point and that brings us nicely on to the aftershocks and where we see brand moving forward, and what dynamic we want to predict.
So I guess let’s start. Let’s start with I’m looking around the table. Who am I? Who am I going to choose? Let’s start with Gemma.
Gemma Livermore: So I find this really intriguing. You know, the fact that people can go and create their own content now on AI, whereas you used to have to know graphic design or, you know, I could create a logo in seconds on Canva on my phone on an app.
And that just seems incredible to me. But how do you keep control of that? You know, and I’m thinking about the new AI videos that you can create. And there was one that was created recently that went viral and it was who owned it. So if AI has created it and I’ve created it on AI, I’m still not the owner of that. So how do you keep control of that?
And how do you keep that central space if you don’t have control over what people, I think, I think it comes back to that point as as much as things are opening up I think when we look forward it’s more than ever that we have to have that single source of truth because things could really get out of hand quite quickly with what people are able to do. So I think it comes back to, let’s learn from our mistakes, of when we look back at the Tremors. It’s the same issue, just a different way. Let’s keep that single source of truth as we go forward because it could go and have fun, create, you know, like I create all sorts of things on my phone and pretend to my kids that I’ve, you know, made them rap songs and all sorts, but don’t, don’t do that to the brand.
Alanna Nensel: Right. And use AI for good, right? So I have two thoughts there, which is AI is so big and so powerful that the initial, I think the initial problems we faced were how do you break it down to what I actually want to use AI for at work and then how do I use it for good, right?
Yeah, because it’s huge and it’s powerful and you want to use it, right? So I actually saw in a recent article on AI that for it to start to work for brands, it needs to feel less IBM and more Pixar, which I thought was like a great quote, because AI that is really clunky or prescriptive or hallucinogenic is not going to help our brands.
We do not want to use it in that way. But if it helps create experiences that resonate with our target audiences, especially if we’re trying to like work for multiple audiences. Tailored to what they need in that moment in a way that would be very labor intensive for us to do ourselves.
Gemma Livermore: And I think it’s important there to say to companies, bring AI in soon for your staff to use. Yeah. In a controlled way. That’s right. Because they will go and use AI elsewhere. Because everyone wants to do their job easier and, you know, more efficiently and better. And they will find an AI they can use externally.
Alanna Nensel: That’s right. So we’ve launched an aI tool at Janice Henderson for probably exactly that reason, like let’s do something that’s sort of approved that people can use and we use it now. For multiple things, but one of them is they run transcripts through it from focus groups.
So we run a lot of client focus groups, and then we run the transcripts through AI to pull out the themes that are common across the focus groups. That would take hours and hours for someone to do.
Maddie Albon : It’s amazing what things like that can do. We’ve got co pilot and after a meeting or a webinar or something, it will pull out the key themes and someone doesn’t have to go through and spend like half an hour of their time
Gemma Livermore: We’ve launched a product that’s really similar to that it’s called Seismic for Meetings. And I just find this incredible because I started my career off on the sales side is, it not only records your meeting, but it gives you feedback. So say you spoke too fast, you spoke too slow.
Alanna Nensel: Oh, I love that.
Gemma Livermore: It also takes away that, personal aspect of, you know, if if you’ve actually got that feedback, where you can take it on board without being insulted and actually change and continuously grow in your career. I think that’s really powerful.
Rachael Rowe: I think so too, those little micro learnings. They just drive efficiency. It even goes one step further and says, here’s the content you should share with them based on what they spoke about, which is just incredible when you think of that piece where people have to create content after a sales call, you know, and they might, you know, in the olden days, they had to come to us.
Gemma Livermore: I know you don’t like people coming to you, Alanna, but don’t come to me. Go to Maddie.
Rachael Rowe: And I think it’s interesting. It feels like we’re entering the era of co pilots, I think, as opposed to Chatbots you know, ChatGPT, Gemini. I think it’s much more now about copilots, about controlling the environment that AI is in and using it to drive workflow efficiency, if you like.
Gemma Livermore: And it comes back to that human element that you mentioned, Maddie, I think AI enables us, but we also have to enable AI. You know, there has to be that human element to it.
Maddie Albon : There’s always got to be the human element. are definitely using so much more AI across our firm. We’re even developing our own AI tools and, but I think that’s just the one thing you can’t take away that human element.
There’s always got to be someone that can filter through. I found, when I started to use chats, With financial services, it doesn’t understand that kind of language very well, I found. I feel like sometimes, you know, try do some things, I’m like, it just doesn’t make that much sense. So I think that’s still something that, you know, you always have to have someone looking at it, and, hmm.
Rachael Rowe: And I think looking at another strand as well, kind of the dynamic within the industry where there’s a real focus on client experience, and understanding personalisation, how to drive deeper personalisation. How do you see brand playing a role in, in that?
Alanna Nensel: Actually it’s funny, so I’m going to answer that maybe with a little bit of an AI lens, but we think a lot about that because we are in markets, and they need to receive the information differently, but one of the ways we’re actually using AI to drive that personalisation in our brand is, we can do a recording of a portfolio manager giving like their quarterly update on their performance and actually have it then delivered in the local language of the client. Mm-Hmm. . So it’s just an audio recording delivered in their language. So like some, it’s delivered in Cantonese or yeah, you know, Spanish or Greek or something that, you know, our PMs do not speak all these languages. Yeah. But AI makes that possible so that it can be received in the language of the listener.
And I think that as a way that will help our brand to feel like, yes, this is a big global brand, but they actually understand me as a client. in, you know, China or, or Japan or Spain or wherever I am. I think that’s really important because I don’t want us to feel like a big, kind of global, unfeeling brand, Like it adds that human touch to it that I think is a nice, but, um, in general we do a lot of thinking in the brand about that in other ways too. So anytime we’re testing, Sort of central messaging. We translate it into every language as part of the testing process to make sure it actually is going to work in all the languages that we use it in.
Because this is, everybody knows these stories, right? Where a brand has gone out with, what is it, the car that like explodes, that bursts in the flame, Yugo, or there was the Fiero. There was a car name and it was, they branded it and it actually means that something like bursts into flames in another language So we do a lot of testing like that to try to make sure we’re not, you know, yeah, naming something that’s actually a bad word in another language.
Yeah.
Rachael Rowe: And do you, do you create feedback loops so that you can see how things are landing? So that you can understand the effectiveness of the brand.
Alanna Nensel: We do. We don’t, I mean, bespoke client research is actually quite expensive. So if you were trying to do that all the time, you’d be spending a lot of money on that.
But we use our local teams as a feedback loop, right? So the people that are out with clients, and then the people that are supporting those people are often very close to what’s happening and can give us really helpful feedback on how things are landing.
Gemma Livermore: I I think as well, when we look forward, we’ve got to, I know you touched on it earlier, Rachael, but I was reading an article in the FT about this great wealth transfer, and we’ve got a very aging population at the moment, and there’s going to be a point where all of that wealth is transferred on.
And whereas in history, you know, a lot of the time that’s gone from male to male for the first time in a while, it’s going to be a big transfer to women. And there’s going to be a real need to brand around that, you know, thinking in terms of financial services and women wanting to invest more in philanthropy and ESG, you know, we’ve got things like the anti greenwashing campaigns coming out from the FCA anyway around ESG, but there’s going to be a real push, I think, towards that when it comes to branding.
Would you two agree? I’d love to hear your views.
Alanna Nensel: Yes, I would agree. I mean, we, we think about that quite a lot, the generational wealth transfer issue, because it’s all going somewhere, right? And you want to sort of feel like you have a hand in helping decide where it’s going to go. We spend a lot of time thinking about DEI.
I’m actually on our DEI committee at Janus Henderson, and we, you know, there’s so many different, you angles of it, but you’re thinking about wealth transfer, you’re thinking about women actually making the financial decisions for a household.
Gemma Livermore: And talking about things going wrong. You know, that brings to mind the NatWest one of the mansplaining where they had the banker apologising to women for not teaching them how to use their bank accounts. And that went so wrong. And it’s like, It’s getting it right. Yes.
Alanna Nensel: And being inclusive. Like, like in marketing 20 years ago, you weren’t looking at all of your stock photography and making sure that it actually represented the broad array of clients that you might be marketing to. Yeah. It, you didn’t even look at who was in your photos.
I didn’t, I don’t think 20 years ago. Now you’re like, let’s make sure this has all a cross representation of, you know, the client base represented in this photo. Let’s make sure that, you know, we’re using the right terms and that we are not, that everything feels really inclusive. and then internally we’re thinking about, you know, are we creating a firm where people can grow to the highest levels, whoever they are, right?
Male, female, anybody, whatever, whatever experience they have, they should be able to see that. There could be a path for them to, to the highest roles.
Rachael Rowe: I think there’s probably a big need as well to coach and develop advisors and the go to market teams about this shift and what that means in terms of the brand promise, but also in terms of the way that news or information is delivered, because there’s an education aspect to this as well, I think.
Because it’s happening with their clients. Precisely. Yeah. So it’s um, it’s very interesting. So, we like to wrap up these sessions by asking you, to give us one word that summarizes the conversation that we’ve had today. And I know it’s a tall order. It’s always a really tricky thing to do. but if you could give me your one word, and then maybe a little bit of an explanation as to why you’ve chosen that word.
so if I start with you, Alanna.
Alanna Nensel: One word? Not two or three.
Rachael Rowe: I’ll give you two .
Alanna Nensel: I think of all the things we were talking about. It’s going to end up being three, but I’m going to make it sound like one.
Um, we’ve talked about AI, we’ve talked about the central source, we’ve talked about why we do what we do. I think what comes to mind is use it for good. Use it for good. Right? Make AI work for you for good. Make your central brand tools work for you for good, so they don’t get stretched out in purple. Make your, you know, your marketing and brand be your air cover for your team, so you’re supporting them. Really everything that we’re trying to do is like use it for good so that it’s adding as much value as it can.
Rachael Rowe: Brilliant. Thank you so much. Maddie, over to you.
Maddie Albon : I would say it’s about understanding. Just like always understanding the brand and the purpose and understanding what your clients want, understanding what your teams need, all the different departments, and just, yeah, always having that, it’s that human element to everything.
Understanding as a person how other people use things, see things, see your brand, see the company. It’s ,yeah, all about understanding.
Rachael Rowe: Perfect. That’s excellent. Thank you so much, Maddie. And the last word to you, Gemma.
Gemma Livermore: I’m stuck between inclusion and feedback because I think it’s inclusion because as we move forward, the brand has to be more inclusive. But to your point, Maddie, you know, it’s that feedback part as well. Because how do you make it more inclusive, so, um, I’m stuck between the two words.
Rachael Rowe: fantastic. Excellent. Well, thank you all so much.
It’s been a great conversation. And I think we could have talked for much, much longer. Uh, we covered a lot of ground. So, thank you for your time. And, uh, we’ll speak to you next time. Thank you very much. Thanks for having us. Awesome.
