March 6, 2015

Retailers & Financial Services learning lessons

By Paul Laughlin

Corner ShopIn recent years, especially since the ‘credit crunch’ recession, it has become common for commentators to look into what Financial Services companies can learn from other industries. These have included Telcos & Retailers among others, with some associated cross-pollination of Marketing leaders crossing sectors (with mixed success).

A number of commentators have shared some good points on the lessons FS could learn from Retail. The first I want to share is this article from CMO magazine, which concisely summarises a number of the lessons which need to be learnt about delivering the integrated digital experience customers expect:

What Financial Services Marketers Can Learn From The Retail Channel

Another, is this real world US case study shared in Forbes magazine. Bankers & Insurers should be able to relate to how risk aversion at Stage Stores required 6 months of shadowing to convince the leadership that analytics could predict pricing changes needed better than experienced retailers:

More recently, I welcome a trend whereby retailers are also beginning to look to Financial Services to learn lessons. Not only due to high-profile falls from grace, like Tesco, this trend is more driven by the investment that a number of FS firms have made in “big data” and “analytics” over many years. Retailers are interested in the proven commercial payback delivered in areas like pricing, marketing spend & multi-channel automation.

As part of this emerging trend. I will be speaking at a event in June this year, for retailers from across Europe. Entitled “Multi-channel Sales & Marketing Strategy Business Tour“, it will be as much a practical workshop as a conference, providing the attending retailers with practical tools to put into practice on their return. It will be interesting to see the reaction & relevance of the customer insight & analytics lessons that I’ve seen work within Financial Services to their multi-channel multi-national challenges.

Advertising for this event is beginning to ramp up and as part of that I’m sharing a series of short interview videos, as I did previously for the #CAI2015 event. Here is one of those, you can find more at our new YouTube channel.

Do let us know what lessons you see can be learnt by Retailers from Financial Services or vice versa, especially in the area of Customer Insight.