In an industry where products and services often seem indistinguishable, financial institutions must find ways to differentiate themselves and create meaningful connections with their audience. On a recent episode of the Banking Transformed podcast, host Jim Marous explored the challenges and opportunities facing financial marketers with Eric Fulwiler, co-founder and CEO of the marketing consultancy Rival.
Q: What were some of your takeaways from The Financial Brand Forum 2024 — not just from the discussions you had but also from the presentation you did and the preparation you did for that presentation?
Eric Fulwiler: I think, first of all, kudos to you and the team at the Forum and Financial Brand for putting on what I think was a great event. So, I’m really happy and excited to be back next year and to have been a small part of what I think was a very successful event this year.
So, our business as Rival is a consultancy agency. We offer marketing services and have also built a little bit of technology. But really, that’s kind of our business. It’s not that complicated in terms of a business model.
However, I believe — and of course, we talked about this a little bit at the Forum, both in my session and the one that we did together, Jim — that modern marketing is as much about thinking and acting like a media company as it is about being a traditional marketer.
Q: When you look at standing apart, you mention getting detention. Getting detention is different than getting a good experience. How do you get that engagement? How do you take that challenger mindset to get more attention, but more importantly, get more engagement, get more pushes on the phone that say, I want to go to your site?
Fulwiler: There are so many things I could talk about. I think the place that I would start is I always try to think about people who might listen to however long this conversation will be, 30, 40 minutes. What are the one or two things that I think are really going to matter most? I would love to stick in people’s minds — and, even better, have them do something different with them. And I think one of them is the importance of differentiation.
I don’t know how to stress that enough. Probably the number one thing that challenger brands are doing to drive mindshare awareness and engagement in their categories is their messaging, which is focused not on what they do, not the benefits of their product, but why it’s different.
Leveraging Technology to Enhance Marketing Strategies
Q: What are some of the trends you see in financial services when it comes to all the technology that marketers have at their disposal from the standpoint of being able to drill down the audience of one, but also, more importantly, the channels that are available to use?
Fulwiler: It’s interesting. Probably the two most common conversations I had in and around the Forum were the ones that I mentioned before: “I’m in this kind of old-school traditional bank that doesn’t want to evolve. How do I get them to understand?”
The other one was my simplification of it. “How do I stay on top of all the changes? There is so much changing in marketing technology and media.”
We’re doing a lot of research now on culture and how culture is becoming fragmented. And it’s no longer a mass macro culture that shapes perception and behavior. It’s all these microcultures, many of which are popping up online on TikTok and Reddit. How do you stay on top of all of that as a brand?
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Banks Need to Build Authentic Brand Narratives
Q: You’ve gotten around quite a bit. You’ve done some round tables with marketing executives even since The Financial Brand Forum. What are some financial brands that you think have successfully differentiated themselves or have raised your eyebrows as far as going, okay, they’re getting something here?
Fulwiler: It’s interesting. I will say I’ve been living here in the UK for eight years now and have spent a good amount of time in the U.S. for work and my family is still in Boston. I don’t know the U.S. landscape and I don’t know the UK landscape or the European landscape. So, I might lean on that a little bit more if that’s okay, but I think the principles still apply.
I always go back to the bread-and-butter example, even though it’s a little bit outdated now: Monzo over here in the UK. They’ve had their struggles trying to break into the U.S., but you can go check them out.
I would encourage people to check it out and maybe we can even link to this in the show notes. A little while ago, the ex-CEO posted a blog about how they thought about marketing in the early days.
The Evolving Role of the Bank CMO
Q: When you look at the future of financial marketing, we’re not going to go too deep into the future, not ten years. But when you look at the future of marketing right today, what do you see that will evolve the most over the next few years?
Fulwiler: I spent seven years working for Gary Vaynerchuk directly and building VaynerMedia in the early days.
One of the things that he always said that I love and will steal here is: “It’s much more about reacting faster and smarter to the present than predicting the future.”
So, whenever anybody asks me what the next five years, what the next ten years, and what the future looks like, I think it’s more about rejecting that question. Instead asking “where are we right now? And where can I close the gaps?”
Q: If a financial marketer today is going to do one thing differently or one thing, period, what do they need to do? In other words, where do I start?
Fulwiler: Sit down and look at the marketing in the world right now, that you’re doing, the last 12 months, the next three months, whatever. Take a piece of it and ask yourself, “if I took my logo off this communication piece, could it be one of my competitors?” Then, have a session with your team to figure out how you can close that gap.
Q: How do people reach out to you or find out more about what you’re doing?
Fulwiler: I’m pretty easy to find online. The company is wearerival.com. If you want to join, you can find out everything about us, including our content hub and a link to the Amp CMO community. We’ve actually had a few new members from The Financial Brand Forum audience since the conference, which was great.
By the way, just in case it’s valuable for people, I think the term community building gets thrown around a lot in the world of marketing. I think we’ve got a very active community. It’s small but mighty, I would say, but we’re much more focused on quality than quantity.
I think the biggest mistake people make with community building is viewing it as their brand trying to bring value to people rather than creating a platform where people can get value from each other.
Most of the conversations in our community are not from anybody at Rival. We’ve created a platform for other marketers around the world to connect and discuss challenger marketing and they get value from that.
Avoiding Common Marketing Mistakes Is Critical
Q: What are some common mistakes financial institutions or marketers make and how can they avoid them?
Fulwiler: I mean, the biggest one for me, but I think that we’ve already squeezed all the juice out of this orange, which is focusing on relevance as opposed to differentiation. So, I’ll talk about something else.
The other risk and mistake is doing things the same way because that’s how you’ve always done them. I think it’s fascinating to think about this term marketing debt. Tech debt, everybody understands. Over time, you just build layer on layer of what is essentially an outdated technology. And at some point, you have to figure out how to rip and replace it and it puts you at a disadvantage.
It’s the same with marketing. If you set your media plans every year, for example, based on what you did the year before, marketing debt will build up in your organization as well.
And actually, this term challenger brand — and I probably should have done this at the beginning — the definition of it, I think a lot of people assume is, well, it’s a startup. It’s an early business that’s going to take risks. It’s a disruptor. To me, the definition is, are you deploying marketing that is fit for the purpose of the world today?
For a longer version of this conversation, listen to “The Art of Standing Out in Financial Service Marketing”, a podcast with Jim Marous, available here. This Q&A has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Justin Estes is an award-winning writer, strategist, and financial marketing expert with expertise in banking, investments, and fintech. His clients include the NYSE, Franklin Templeton, Credit Karma, Citi and, UBS, and his work has appeared in Forbes, Barrons and ThinkAdvisor as well as The Financial Brand.