Topic: Marketing transformation in banking
At UBL Fund Managers, we had a range of Islamic investment funds that very few people knew about. Islamic banks were reluctant to sell them, because the funds carried a conventional bank’s name. An AC Nielsen study showed that 43% of investors preferred an Islamic investment product, against 23% for conventional funds. The demand was clear, and our brand was standing in its way.
The answer lay well beyond a new advertising campaign. It was time to build the board case for Al Ameen Funds, a separate company with its own Shariah scholars, fund managers, sales force, facilitation centers and website. The board approved it, and within five to six years Al Ameen had grown a large portfolio matching the conventional fund business. That experience shaped how I see marketing: its greatest value comes when it helps shape the business itself.
The brand promise and the customer experience
Financial services are built on trust. Customers place their confidence in an institution to help them manage money, protect what they have built and plan for what comes next. That makes the link between the brand’s promise and the customer’s experience especially important.
A bank can run an impressive campaign and communicate its values beautifully. The real test comes when a customer opens an account, resolves a problem or waits for a response. Marketing is well placed to see where expectations and experience drift apart, bring that insight into business decisions and work with other teams to close the gap. The strongest brands keep their promises consistently.
From campaigns to commercial outcomes
Reach, impressions, awareness and engagement remain useful measures. They tell us whether a message is seen and whether people respond. The fuller picture comes from harder questions. Did the campaign attract the right customers? Did they activate and stay? Did product adoption grow? Did the spend create new business, or reward customers who would have acted anyway?
At one organization I worked, I built a measurement framework in three layers: leading indicators such as satisfaction, portal adoption and onboarding speed; behavioral indicators such as participation and transactions volume; and business outcomes such as growth, retention and revenue. Each layer had its own dashboard for operational, management and executive audiences. It allowed us to show that every 10% rise in participation brought an 18% rise in revenue, and that changed how leadership saw the value of client engagement.
Digital transformation starts with the customer
Customers now expect convenience, speed and relevance, and the freedom to complete a task without friction. Putting an old process on a screen leaves it as confusing as before. Transformation begins with understanding where customers struggle.
When we redesigned the exchange’s investor portal, we started with more than 30 group conversations with investors of every segment and experience level. We re-built the site mobile-first, because most people reached us by phone, added animated tutorials , where to find what with live links, increased the loading speed and cut the onboarding process steps. Portal adoption rose 80% in a year, mobile traffic grew from 28% to 62%, and questions to our helpline about “how do I” fell by 45%.
Testing matters as much as design. At a Bank, two teams disagreed on the best way to bring customers onto our mobile app, so we ran a controlled pilot with about 4,000 customers. The version that combined a QR code with a 30-second instructional video lifted downloads by 41% and cut the cost of each activated customer by about 18%. The data settled the debate, and it showed that the explanation mattered as much as the channel.
Marketing at the strategy table
My titles have almost always carried business development alongside marketing, and that pairing has shaped my view of the role. At the exchange, marketing’s ambition reached well beyond visibility: developing the market, attracting investors, broadening participation and helping people understand what capital markets offer. At UBL, it meant taking a loss-making distribution unit and making it the firm’s largest revenue contributor within two years.
Marketing contributes most when it joins early, while priorities are set, propositions are shaped and customer barriers are examined. Marketing leaders need to understand the economics of the business, the motivations of customers, the competitive landscape and the operations behind every promise. The wider organization, in turn, gains from treating brand and customer perception as business assets.
What transformation should deliver
A transformed marketing function can answer three questions clearly. What customer or market need are we addressing? How will our response create value for the customer and for the institution? What evidence will tell us we have succeeded?
The answer may be a new proposition, a better digital journey, sharper communication, stronger relationship management or a new approach to customer education. The solution will vary from case to case, and the discipline stays the same. For me, marketing transformation means helping a bank create, communicate and deliver value in new ways, and proving it with evidence.
What would change if banks brought marketing into strategy from the start, and measured it by the value it creates for customers and the business?