A dream creative brief:

Challenge

The financial “Rollover” — the act of moving money from an old 401k to an individual IRA — makes up forty percent of new retail investment dollars. Rollovers are hugely profitable for financial services firms. However these firms face multiple challenges in the fight to attract rollovers:

• Weak relationships with the consumer
• No compelling reason to act. Most individuals have investments scattered across multiple ‘old’ 401ks.

Target Audience

Women Investors. Women have the money; they will control 70% of America’s wealth by 2020. However, women are mostly ignored by financial services firms. And it shows. Affluent women in their fifties give financial services firms 30% lower Net Promoter Scores (NPS) than their male counterparts. Investing is marketed as a male activity with a focus on results over process, data over relationships.

What motivates the audience?

Behavior studies both at home and in the workplace show women derive deep satisfaction from the process of organization. See the success of the Container Store as testament (with a 70-80% female shopper base).

Insight

Connect rollover to the empowering attributes of organization. When asked about having old 401k accounts women will say it feels messy, like a disorganized life closet. They want their money cleaned up.

Concept

Partner with the Container Store and offer a ‘Financial Clean-Up System’ that’s as easy and personalized as Elfa.

The offering would naturally work for an established financial brand. The in-store experience would be similar to how you shop for shelving. There’d be human help with digital scale. The concept leverages a powerfully complementary partnership for both customer attraction and sales.

Testing ideas:

• Draw the experience on a whiteboard in a DesignThink session to test with your target
• Buy search terms that test the potential emotional affinity between home and financial organization
• Digital storefront. Establish prototype of offering on containerstore.com before moving into physical store

The ideas in this post were inspired by the wonderful book, Brandscaping, Unleashing the Power of Partnerships by the equally wonderful and local marketing maven, Andrew Davis.

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