Tuesdata: The most popular financial services brands this year

BY Tim Burrowes

July 11, 2022 11:38

Tuesdata: The most popular financial services brands this year

Welcome to Tuesdata, where we pick apart the most interesting data in the media and marketing industry.

As we go deeper into a cost of living crisis a number of brands will be closely monitoring their consumer perception. Directly in the firing line are finance brands.

With the RBA lifting the cash rate again last week, this time by 50 basis points, it’s time to look at how consumers rate the financial services brands that they use.

The full content of this post is for Unmade’s paying members only. Others will hit the paywall a little lower down.

Statistics this week are provided by market research company YouGov, which creates the YouGov BrandIndex.

It tracks finance brands and gathers a net recommended score by asking respondents, “Would you recommend the brand to a friend or colleague?”. Only respondents who are current or former customers of a given brand are interviewed.

The finance sector includes a range of brands from insurance to banks, superannuation, payment networks and more.

Despite their speed at passing on rate rises, a big bank does manage to make it into the top five. It should be noted though that for the majority of this year rate rises were merely a threat rather than a reality, with the first rise taking place in early May.

It was payment brands, however, that have really endeared themselves to consumers in 2022.

A brand can technically score as high as 100, although a good score is generally anything in positive territory, with some brands falling into negative territory.

The most popular finance brands amongst consumers

YouGov BrandIndex top five finance brands, YTD 2022

1. Paypal

The San Jose-based open digital payments platform tops the charts by a significant margin. In Australia, it’s been in operation since 2005 and has over 7m active users.

Lately its marketing strategy has focused around partnerships, particularly the Melbourne Fashion Festival. But it has a history of consumer-friendly initiatives such as its 2020 Buy from the Bush Marketplace, a campaign that showcased rural business in time for Christmas. It came in a year where many in regional areas had endured both the start of the pandemic as well as the end of catastrophic bushfires.

In Australia, PayPal has worked with Edelman, Dentsu Creative, Vizeum and iProspect. While its market value has dropped significantly this year (down 63.85% year to date), most investor reports believe it is in a great position to increase its value.

2. Visa

The second payment brand in the list, this time last year Visa refreshed its global brand via Wieden+Kennedy. The rebrand used a more stylised version of ‘Visa’ and put more emphasis on its brand colours, which interestingly are very close to a direct match with the colours of Ukraine’s flag.

It may seem inconsequential, but plenty of behavioural psychologists suggest these types of associations, on purpose or not (and this of course is not) can have flow on effects.

Around the same time last year Visa appointed Natalie Lockwood to the position of vice president, head of marketing, Australia, New Zealand and South Pacific. She replaced Jac Phillips, who is now an executive coach.

It was also named as one of the lowest scoring brands on a study conducted by The Lab that analysed 6.8 million mentions of 190 brands in Australia to rank the best and worst performing based on specific corporate social responsibility metrics.

3. Mastercard

Another payments platforms creates a hat trick for the sector in the YouGov BrandIndex. Most of the industry will be familiar with the ‘Priceless’ tagline, something which could also be attributed to its efforts during the worst of the pandemic.

Via McCann, it created the Virtual Fan campaign for the 2021 Australian Open. A custom Instagram filter allowed anyone to beam their reactions to the tennis action onto the face of a court-side virtual fan, and even become part of the global broadcast.

It was also named 2021 Amp Best Audio Brand and recently unveiled its first ever music album titled Priceless at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

It’s not just consumers that are happy with Mastercard. According to the brand itself, 95% of MasterCard employees are proud to be part of the brand.

4.ING

The first bank on the list but not one of the big ones – Dutch bank ING is familiar with Tuesdata. Two weeks ago it made the list for the top five home loan brands based on advertising spend, coming in at number five in that list according to Nielsen Ad Intelligence.

In this case, its own consumers have vouched for it despite the recent media around customer dumping, which we highlighted on the last list it featured in as well.

ING’s marketing has refocused on the lion mascot after quickly pivoting to help its customers through the pandemic, or at least provide them with take out minus the delivery fee thanks to a partnership with UberEats.

5. Commonwealth Bank

A big bank just manages to scrape in thanks to Commonwealth Bank. It only just lost out to ING in the rankings. It’s been a big year in the marketing world for the bank that ‘can’, with Qantas marketing boss Jo Boundy announced as its new CMO in December.

It’s recently put a lot of its budget behind sports, in particular women’s professional sports (it’s the naming rights partner of the Matildas soccer team), with campaigns via M&C Saatchi.

The brand has never been shy of a big campaign, and also redid its brand and logo as recently as 2020 to lean more on the yellow at the expense of the black.

Its score may take a hit in the future though, with the major banks including CommBank, being quick to pass on the RBA rate rises in full while dithering on lifting the rates for its savings account customers.

The board turns red again

It’s been more than a week since the Unmade Index has lit up red but here we are again. Congratulations to Enero Group, the only one on the Index that managed to see a gain.

The wave-like fortunes of Seven West Media continue with the media owner down 5.95% but still comfortably over $600m mark for market value.

Meanwhile Nine fell 2.61%. The talk early in the week was that the rise of Nick Kyrgios as a real threat to the top echelon of men’s tennis could do wonders for the bargaining power of Tennis Australia when it comes to renegotiations of the Australian Open coverage

Nine currently holds the rights until 2024, with the retirement of Ash Barty looking like it would devalue the coverage slightly. But that was before Kyrgios’ breakout Wimbledon performance. The big question now is whether or not he can maintain the motivation.