3 Ways to Help Gen Z Build Financial Knowledge Through Social

Read more about 3 Ways to Help Gen Z Build Financial Knowledge Through Social

3 Ways to Help Gen Z Build Financial Knowledge Through Social

Go-To-Market Strategy Go-To-Market Strategy, Social, Social Campaigns, Social moments 3 min read

When we think about Gen Z, some themes and assumptions emerge: they’re ambitious, adventurous, nostalgic. Most importantly, they’re known to take financial responsibility seriously, yet they often lack financial literacy to meet their goals. We’ve covered before how financial service brands can build long-term trust with Gen Z, but to address their money-driven ideals, we need to consider how informed Gen Z consumers are when it comes to making financial decisions—and how brands can help them.

Social media is the perfect place for brands to start building relationships with Gen Z audiences while fulfilling their need for personalization, speed and simplicity of engagement. They’re driven to this space for guidance, as a recent GWI report revealed that only 55% of Gen Z say that they are supported by their bank to meet their personal finance goals.

Just look at social channels and you’ll find financial advice in abundance. But ironically, this sea of unfiltered, unverified and untailored content contributes to confusion, because Gen Z are faced with analysis paralysis as they vet the information out there. This opens the opportunity for brands to deliver content that engages in conversations about money and, most importantly, gives Gen Z the means to take action. Below are three ways that financial service brands can leverage social content that captures, engages and empowers Gen Z as they secure their financial destinies.

Brand as a platform for change: offer alternative saving strategies.

One way that brands can offer value to Gen Z with social content is by providing a space for them to take action through conversation. Gen Z increasingly prefers “soft saving,” a philosophy that focuses on building comfort and minimizing stress. This is in stark contrast to unsustainable, short-term money “hacks” like the FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement and its various offshoots that go viral. The takeaway for brands: lean into social communities of like-minded savers and spenders and support them with product and industry knowledge when needed.

This has been done on a product and feature level by brands such as DBS Bank The Burrow and The Finance Bar. Options for crowdsourcing financial advice could support both lifestyle choices of Gen Z consumers and serve as a tool for product promotion if positioned in the right way.

Brand as publisher: spotlight insights from real people.

As touched on above, Gen Z isn’t a monolith; there are lots of differing perspectives and philosophies around money. By positioning themselves as publishers, brands can normalize talking about money and addressing the different tactics Gen Z uses to better manage their finances. The opportunity here is to curate a diversity of profiles and situations that Gen Z audiences can relate to.

Refinery29’s Money Diaries does a great job of this by offering a view into how money is spent differently for everyone. This format has been popularized and adapted into social content series, too, such as Money Diaries by Sav Finance. What’s great about the format is brands can feature real people or tap into trends, like the #cashstuffing saving method that went viral on TikTok or the evergreen content of #whatispendinamonth.

Brand as culture: educate and entertain.

Financial advice must be nuanced to ensure the right information is given based on an individual’s needs. That same principle applies to influences who represent brands and speak as a source of truth, as advice can quickly turn into misinformation. This danger was made clear in the high-profile lawsuits against YouTubers in the wake of the FTX collapse.

Nevertheless, there’s still opportunity to offer educational content on social media in a fun way with well-loved personalities. Klarna partnered with Snoop Dogg and Twitch streamers KittyPlays and SypherPK to host a gamified, two-day event. Viewers were challenged to win gaming equipment by playing against the pros, getting a taste of what they can buy through the Klarna app’s “buy now, pay later” payment plans while interacting with their favorite personalities.

This offers Gen Z value beyond money, and when brands speak in terms of value instead of dollars, they offer a universal experience that can be relevant regardless of one’s financial circumstances. So don’t just focus on showing consumers how to make money quickly; cater to culture to drive the most value for Gen Z now.

Speak the language of Gen Z.

Financial service brands looking to capture, engage, and empower Gen Z should prioritize creating content that speaks to their unique perspectives and challenges when it comes to money. By offering alternative saving strategies, spotlighting insights from real people, and educating and entertaining in a way that goes beyond just financial advice, brands can build long-term trust with their audiences.

As Gen Z continues to grow in their financial responsibility, financial service brands have an opportunity to play a valuable role in supporting their journey towards financial security, and social media is a key channel to bring that to life. At the end of the day, it’s all about bringing value in the most direct, honest and relatable way.

Find out three ways that financial service brands can leverage social content that captures, engages and empowers Gen Z. social media marketing social content gen z brand activation strategy Social Social Campaigns Go-To-Market Strategy Social moments

Start Your Story • A Transformational Brand Refresh and Launch Campaign

Client
uni
Solutions
BrandBrand Identity & SystemsGo-To-Market StrategyMediaPaid SearchPaid Social

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Case Study

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Reimagining a legacy brand.

As a world-class provider of innovative writing and art instruments, uniball had always been well aware of the power that lies in doing things differently. But for a 135-year-old brand that held its position as an industry leader for decades, change doesn’t come without its challenges. To write the brand’s most exciting chapter yet, we teamed up with uniball and developed a fresh brand identity, along with a go-to-market strategy that helped introduce it to the world. Renamed as uni, we launched the brand through an end-to-end omnichannel campaign spanning content, film, media buying and more—honoring its heritage while looking forward to the future.

A woman wearing a colorful jacket stands in her studio

A woman drawing in her notebook with a uni pen

Press The vision for this campaign is to celebrate and empower people to take control of their personal journey.

Transforming the brand experience from the inside out.

To create a new brand identity that resonates with consumers, we started by conducting a research study surveying over 500 primary household shoppers in the writing instrument category. This study informed the overall tone of voice, as well as the creation of hundreds of new brand assets—including a refined logo and color palette, brand guidelines, packaging and merchandising, social media channels, applications, OOH and print advertising. Turning uniball into uni, we helped create a more friendly brand, an approach that’s reflected in the optimized, revamped website. With different textures and popping colors, uni’s brand identity went from traditional to transformational—changing consumer perception while driving inspiration and fostering a stronger connection to the brands’ identity.

An insight-led campaign to establish stronger relationships.

To create a brand that resonates with consumers today, it’s vital to understand their core needs and shifting behaviors, as well as the market trends. So before we could introduce uni to the world, our strategy team identified customer, cultural, category and company insights through both primary and syndicated research. In doing so, we found that recent world events had awakened a desire to create and take on new challenges in the target audience. With this in mind, we developed a go-to-market strategy that articulated this sentiment.

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Inspiring audiences to craft their own stories.

Once the new brand identity was ready and the research concluded, we developed and launched Start Your Story, an omnichannel campaign that centers on the first-person experiences of those writing their own futures. We focused on the brand’s inspiration pillar and kept an optimistic tone of voice that encouraged the audience to connect with their creative selves—raising brand awareness and driving audiences to see uni as a modern brand with a fresh new take.

To achieve maximum reach, our teams worked together to leverage the original research and created target personas, as well as allocated budget splits across media channels. This included using a testing framework with three creative variations and four measurement initiatives such as Brand Lift Studies and GWI Research, with data shown on an interactive live dashboard. In other words, we ensured the campaign was rolled out across today’s most relevant channels, according to their purpose within the brand ecosystem.

Results

616% + planned paid media via online video and YouTube reach
353% + planned social paid media reach
46% + benchmark video completion rate
30% + benchmark click-through rate
29% + CPC benchmark with SEM

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You’ve Analyzed Your Brand Health Data. Here’s How to Make It Matter.

Read more about You’ve Analyzed Your Brand Health Data. Here’s How to Make It Matter.

You’ve Analyzed Your Brand Health Data. Here’s How to Make It Matter.

3 min read

As marketers, particularly in light of today’s new normal, it’s absolutely critical that we understand the perceptions our customers and our target audiences have about our brand.

One thing we can all generally agree on (and have mostly come to accept) is that customer preferences and perceptions are a moving target and will likely continue to change in the foreseeable future. We know that COVID-19 has shifted consumer behavior in dramatic and long-lasting ways. And we know that recent social and political issues have made consumers more selective about which products, brands, and companies they hold dear or drop. So understanding what your customers are thinking about your brand is table stakes for change-proofing your brand.

While gathering consumer insights and data on the strength of your brand is critically important—and an essential start—many marketing teams mistakenly stop there, viewing moment-in-time results as an indication of overall brand health similar to an annual physical or end-of-term report card. In today’s changing world, a snapshot of customer perceptions and sentiment is just not enough to effectively guide marketing decisions. Monitoring brand health by tracking and analyzing data over time will help you keep your finger squarely on the pulse of what your customers are feeling and thinking.

So, once you’ve collected your brand health data and tracked it over time, you’re ready to apply those insights to decisions you’re making around brand positioning, marketing investments, and overall marketing strategy. Here’s how.

Better position your brand

The brand tracking results you’ve collected will provide the insights you need to determine whether it’s advantageous—or necessary—to adjust your brand positioning. Here are some questions you should be asking yourself about your brand and the things to look for in your tracking results that can help you adjust your positioning strategy.

Is your brand position still a good fit for your markets? Ideally, your brand position should maximize how relevant your brand is to your customers and your brand’s distinctiveness relative to competitors. You should reevaluate your brand positioning if the brand tracker results indicate:

Customers are beginning to associate your competitors with your distinctive brand position.
Customer sentiment has shifted and customers are now finding other qualities or features more important. This would signal a drop in your brand’s relevancy

Is there open space that could give your brand a strategic advantage? In addition to indicating the relative strength of your brand’s position, your brand tracker data and perceptual map can also give you a sense of whether there’s an opportunity to position your brand more strategically. For example, you may realize that a quality like “trustworthiness” is highly relevant to your customers and is also a territory that no one owns. It would be worth investigating whether your brand should be repositioned to capitalize on that opportunity.

Adjust your channel and market investments

Your brand tracker will also provide insights into which aspects of your brand are strong and where there are opportunities for improvement. Brand awareness, familiarity, and consideration will help guide your overall marketing investment in channels and markets.

Evaluating channels

Low results for brand awareness, familiarity, and consideration could be an opportunity to invest more in top-of-funnel channels to boost awareness
High levels of brand awareness but low levels of purchase intent and preference may have you shifting resources to focus more on conversion and lower-funnel marketing

Evaluating markets

Country-level or market-level results from your brand tracker will provide an opportunity to assess where and how you’re marketing

Refine your marketing research strategy

Your findings will, inevitably, lead you to a lot of questions. And there’s a good chance a lot of your questions will start with “why.” Why is customer sentiment shifting? Why did awareness decline in APAC? Any insights that will guide changes to marketing strategy should be based on those findings that show up over multiple waves of your brand tracker. If your “whys” are related to findings that are consistent over time, they merit further investigation and should be incorporated into your overall research strategy. Here are some additional research next steps to consider:

Invest in reports about consumer behavior and trends specific to your industry and market
Conduct focus groups or interviews to better understand brand perception and decision-making factors
Field a survey to get clarity on your target audience

Think marathon, not sprint

Brand management is a long-term strategy and a brand tracking program is a significant investment of both time and money. But, I promise you, if you collect and analyze customer data on a continuum—rather than at a moment in time—the rewards will be well worth the effort. Using your brand tracking results to guide your marketing strategy will not only help you make the most of your research investment, it will ensure that your brand, investment, and research strategies come from a place of knowledge, so you’re making the right decisions at the right time.

It’s critical you understand the perceptions your customers and your target audiences have about your brand. Here’s how to apply those insights to the decisions you’re making. You’ve Analyzed Your Brand Health Data. Here’s How to Make It Matter. brand awareness Brand health brand activation strategy consumer insights brand strategy

Zip-Lining from a War Zone and onto Computer Screens

Read more about Zip-Lining from a War Zone and onto Computer Screens

Zip-Lining from a War Zone and onto Computer Screens

4 min read

Physical activations are great for impressing an in-person audience, but they can pull double duty by engaging with audiences far away as well. In fact, they should.

The online buzz, PR and social media engagement produced by an impressive physical experience can be well worth the cost when done right. The secret to a good experience? It’s one that “compresses time and space,” says MediaMonks Director of US Production and Partnerships Chris Byrne. What might sound like witchcraft (or a scary sci-fi plot) is actually a simple strategy for producing experiences that engage far and wide—here’s how to achieve it.

Treat physical and digital experience as equals.

It might be tempting to privilege physical experience over digital, but an experience that truly engages with a distant audience must not treat digital as an afterthought. When planning out your experience, try considering first and foremost how to create an exciting experience for digital audiences, then look for answers on how physical elements can make it even cooler. The key is to provide your audience with the ability to make significant impacts on the experience no matter where they are in the world—not treat them as a passive viewership who’s watching everyone else have fun.

In addition to the typical geek-themed influencers you’d expect at Comic-Con, the Jack Ryan Experience also invited pro athletes like Ronda Rousey and Richard Sherman to take part. Their presence helped to stretch the experience’s appeal beyond just geek culture while maintaining relevance to the experience’s physically demanding challenges.

Physical and digital experiences go really well together—a bit more like peanut butter and jelly than oil and vinegar. Your approach to extending the reach of any physical experience, then, involves carefully considering how one audience’s actions support (or challenge) the other’s. By striking this balance, you should have little trouble extending your experience’s digital reach.

Curious what the Jack Ryan Experience was really like?

Get a participant’s perspective on the activation.

Early in its planning stages, the Jack Ryan Experience was conceived as a game of laser tag in which IRL participants were pitted against the internet. It eventually ballooned into a 60,000 square-foot hyperreal obstacle course that took the form of a Middle East black site, though one quality remained from the beginning: both digital and IRL participants were supported in equal measure. In the project’s final iteration, the competitive aspect between those participating physically vs. online were retained by allowing Twitch viewers to launch attacks at participants while they watched live.

Monk Thoughts Quality of interactivity is key—just react in a fun way.

Chris Byrne

Global Program Director, MediaMonks

If flashy explosions rendered in VR seem outside the realm of your budget, don’t despair. “It’s not about the size of the interaction, but how you do it,” says Byrne. What really makes the digital interaction click for Twitch viewers of the Jack Ryan Experience is that they get instant visual feedback and can see how their presence makes a mark on the environment by hindering the progress of those attending in-person.

Ask participants to share the fun.

Experiences that are given a life online aren’t bounded by physical constraints, nor should they be bounded by time. Even if your experience or activation takes place during an event, a smart multichannel strategy should allow it to extend beyond the confines of its event or hosting stage. From microsites that promote the experience before and after to highlighting key user-generated content (UGC) collected over its course, plan for ways to attract audiences no matter where—or when—they browse.

UGC played a key role in the Jack Ryan experience’s success. At the experience’s bazaar segment, for example, participants were tasked to fulfill small missions that involved puzzle-solving, engaging with actors and taking photos. These small challenges helped participants insert themselves into the world of an IP, then share that experience with their friends. Automatic video capture also provided participants with a custom video of their visit that they could also share to social media.

Some participants even walked away with some swag, which also provided them with something to share and brag about online. And that’s an important note to remember: UGC also has the potential to ignite a sense of fear of missing out (FOMO) in digital audiences, prompting them to sniff out more information or to follow along with the event from afar. In fact, encouraging FOMO was among the top goals for the Jack Ryan experience to build buzz: “The throughput wasn’t the intent,” Eric Shamlin told the audience at the DigitalLA summit. “FOMO and social conversation were the intent, along with PR response.” Consumers want to strike a human connection through digital media, and sharing their good experiences—wish you were here!—is a key way to do it.

Broaden the audience with influencers.

One key way to share the fun is to invite influencers to participate in your experience, then broadcast their impressions to their online audience. While partnering with influencers aligned with your niche is a great idea, you might also consider working with someone who can extend beyond the first demographics that come to mind.

Brand activations and experiences can go a long way—literally. Integrating digital user experience is essential to extending your brand activation campaign to audiences far and wide. Zip-Lining from a War Zone and onto Computer Screens A solid activation bridges the gap between in-person participants and those experiencing the fun from far away.
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