The BreakFast Sessions: Brand Evolution from start-up to scale up and beyond
October’s BreakFast Session was with Jasper Martens, CMO of PenionBee. Jasper was PensionBee's first hire and has seen the brand grow from startup to leading pension provider status with some £1.3bn savings administered by the company.
In a fun and wide ranging chat we covered innovation, product development and the maturation rate of cheese, but here are three of our key take outs from the session.
(Quotations below are all from Jasper)
1. Love your customer
"Love is one of our 5 core values. If you love your customer you're doing everything possible to give them the product they really want, and they will love you back for it."
As PensionBee's customer base has grown (to some 350,000 savers in the UK), loving their customer has been key to their success. For example, every customer gets their own personal 'Beekeeper': "It's not the cheapest way to do it, but we still believe it's the best way to serve our customers, and to keep them with us"
Loving means listening: at PensionBee they interview at least 10 customers a week, and all conversations, in every channel, are tagged by topic so everyone in the company can see what customers care about. And it means loving even your most difficult customers.
"When we see a 1 star review instead of a 4 star review, I wouldn't say an alarm button goes off, but we have a specific team who will then contact that person and find out what happened, to try and fix it for them and see if we can fix the problem in the product road-map"
Love also means maintaining that care over the course of a long-term relationship.
"It is a responsibility. We feel very responsible for the fact that people are trusting their retirement savings with us."
Interestingly, PensionBee has strived to ensure that it's workforce is not only diverse, but represents their customer base.
"25% of our customers are over 50. As a FinTech firm we have a younger workforce, so we need to ensure that we hire older people who better understand our customers. The same goes for gender mix in the company".
2. Pensions need to change, and keep changing.
The idea for PensionBee was born when Romi, founder and CEO, encountered frustration and difficulties when trying to transfer her own pensions. And Romi was previously in Investment Banking with Goldman Sach and Morgan Stanley. If it was difficult for her, then it was a problem that needed solving for everyone.
PensionBee was launched, initially, to make consolidation as simple as possible. But the desire to remove friction from the process hasn't stopped there:
"Historically, pensions companies have made it necessarily difficult to consolidate your pensions. When draw down was introduced, the industry went in exactly the same direction, making it difficult and charging people to take their own money out"
Excuses of legacy systems have been around for over a decade: plenty of time for them to have fixed those problems.
A lack of transparency around process and fees has eroded trust in the whole market. Jasper and PensionBee's vision is for more portable, more personal pensions that are seen more like a long term ISA: "It would be fantastic if in ten years time, everyone had a dashboard and I could compare my old pensions pots with other providers, and easily combine them into a plan I feel comfortable with. Even better if I have my own pension pots that I take from employer to employer."
3. Invest in your brand
PensionBee launched with a single-minded proposition: consolidation. However "as other people are coming to the market with a very similar proposition, therefore our [distinctive] brand needed to be much more prominent in our advertising."
Moving away from features has seen them stress the warmer, emotional benefits of moving to PensionBee.
"We asked our customer what it felt like moving to PensionBee, and they all said something along the lines of 'it felt like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders, so we represented that in our advertising, rather than showing a photo of a phone. If you take the photo of a phone and make it green, it could still be anyone's."
Spending on brand-led advertising has "Definitely lowered our customer acquisition costs". By measuring app downloads and installs in the 6 minutes after an ad airs, and stripping out the background activity, the team could see improved performance (and larger transfer values) from brand vs. feature led advertising: "Be proud of your brand. If you feel it's a strong one: use it."
A strong brand is not only built through advertising though. Membership in industry groups, and partnering with great fund managers for credibility, entering and winning awards - all of these have helped PB grow credibility and trust.
Watch the full session below:
Through our BreakFast sessions, we talk to leaders in the Design and Innovation industry. The talks are filmed live. We talk about their industry and business, we learn from their experience and create an open forum for questions and new ideas. Visit createfuture.com to sign up for the next session and to watch recordings of the previous talks.