2011 Retail Banking Brand Vulnerability Study | Introduction
“This planet had a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much all of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”
-- Introduction from “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams
A little over a year ago, a boutique management consulting firm was established with a simple goal - to help businesses align the operations, finance, and marketing functions behind the core principle of creating customers.
Along the way, we realized that the analytical frameworks most used to diagnose brand health are designed solely around the understanding of a brand’s strengths. Weakness is treated as an analytical byproduct. A brand is deemed weak, for instance, if it lacks certain desirable attributes, or if key associations aren’t as strong as they are for competitors.
We developed the patent-pending Brand Vulnerability Methodology to close this gap.
To illustrate the power of the insight gathered from the Brand Vulnerability Methodology, we have conducted the first in a series of studies designed to diagnose the vulnerability of the major players in various categories.
Given the dynamic challenges facing the major players in retail banking and the high degree of historic inertia associated with customer switching behavior, we felt that examining Brand Vulnerability in this category would be particularly interesting.
As the first publicly available Brand Vulnerability Study, we hope you are intrigued by this new approach. In subsequent studies, we will be examining the Brand Vulnerability in other categories, including: Telecommunications, Technology, and Travel & Leisure.
We hope you will see that Brand Vulnerability Analysis can be a very powerful tool for businesses looking to quantify the impact of the vulnerabilities in financial terms and identify immediate competitive vulnerabilities on which a brand / business can capitalize.
Always remember – DON’T PANIC!
