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The Financial Services Marketing Handbook

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The Financial Services Marketing Handbook

Tactics and Techniques that Produce Results

Bloomberg Press,

15 min read
10 take-aways
Audio & text

What's inside?

For financial service providers who are new to marketing: how to build marketing plans, use them, and know what works.

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Editorial Rating

7

Qualities

  • Applicable

Recommendation

No one claims that marketing any service is easy, but marketing financial services is especially difficult. Today, you can buy financial products – mutual funds, insurance, banking services, mortgages, credit cards – through a variety of channels and providers, often at a discount. This creates a challenge for financial marketers, who tend to rely on proven time-tested marketing techniques from other industries that are not always effective for financial products. Here, consultants Evelyn Ehrlich and Duke Fanelli present marketing basics in a financial services context. Their best material comes from short case studies or vignettes from real financial services companies. Readers may wish there were more of these since much of the marketing content is not new. This is a good basic book for newcomers to marketing in the financial services industry, but veterans will find it less valuable. getAbstract recommends it to novice marketers or to those working in financial service firms’ non-marketing areas (such as operations, shareholder services or sales) who want a marketing briefing.

Summary

It’s Only Money

When old-line brokerage firms and investment banks dominated Wall Street, financial marketing served a limited purpose. Investors and financial product purchasers had more distinct, constrained choices. But although competition among firms and among products has increased geometrically, financial marketing companies have not adopted enough modern marketing techniques to be truly competitive.

Financial products are not sold like traditional products or services. Often they are sold through a two-tier sales force comprised of wholesalers who sell to retail brokers who present the products to the customer. Further, the sale of financial products is regulated, complicated and variable, as new products are always being introduced and market conditions constantly fluctuate.

To complicate matters, financial products differ from other products in that their underlying medium – money – is highly emotional and provokes its own set of attitudes and behaviors. Variables, such as the client’s degree of control over spending and saving, investment knowledge, willingness to rely on experts and comfort with risk all affect the marketing process. The selling cycle...

About the Authors

Evelyn Ehrlich, PhD, has been president of Ehrlich Creative Communications, a marketing consulting firm, since 1982. Her clients have included many financial service companies. She has a PhD from New York University. Louis A. “Duke” Fanelli has more than 25 years of marketing experience in financial services. He spent 15 years at J.P. Morgan Chase managing the retail sales network and worked as a journalism and public relations executive.

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