Best of 2023: Building the future

ising inflation, high energy prices, steadily increasing interest rates and a cost of living crisis.

It’s certainly not the textbook market environment within which to launch a new retail investing proposition. And yet, in the autumn of 2022, a joint venture between Moneyfarm and M&G began testing for a new investing app.

The entirely new “&me” proposition is the result of both organisations wanting to increase their footprint in the direct-to-consumer space, off the back of substantial growth in the UK direct investing market in recent years.

According to the figures quoted when the JV was announced, direct personal investing had seen assets under management grow to £351 billion by the end of June 2021.

However, gaining a foothold in consumer investment market is far harder than the figures suggest. Recent years have been littered with expensive launches, which later withered and died.

BlackRock-backed Scalable Capital quit the UK in 2021 to focus instead on the German market. Moola, the platform founded by TV personality Gemma Godfrey, was sold to JLT Employee Benefits in 2018, but later closed in 2020, while Investec’s Click & Invest brand lasted just two years before it was shuttered in 2019.

As anybody in investments knows, past performance does not determine future behaviours. And, having announced a “digital wealth partnership” in January 2022, M&G and Moneyfarm set to work on creating their new brand. Initially, M&G took the lead on the brand creation and Moneyfarm was commissioned to work on the tech delivery. However, as the two organisations started working more closely, M&G embraced Moneyfarm’s business-to-consumer (B2C) approach, eventually asking them to lead on marketing strategy across all channels.

Talent spotting
As both businesses started planning their strategic objectives for the initial years of the new brand, they started to look for an experienced marketer to lead the take-to-market strategy.

Given the product set was investment-focussed, some might have opted for a seasoned investment marketer, or perhaps a corporate comms lead with an experience in finance. But they did neither.

In September 2022, Moneyfarm appointed lifelong consumer goods marketer Shweta Sharma to lead the brand launch of &me. It was a world away from Sharma’s previous roles, but her consumer knowledge would prove invaluable. In the month’s that followed, she would use her experience at GSK, Akzo Nobel, Premier Foods, Revlon and Unilever to success.

“When I came here, I asked why everyone in investment talks like that,” she said in an interview with Financial Promoter. “Everything felt like a boilerplate legal requirement. We worked intensively with behaviour consultants to refine it.”

Sharma explains that work on the tone of voice for &me was one of the most significant pieces of work for her team. It is also an agenda that has continued to this day.

These efforts required extensive discussions with both M&G and Moneyfarm because Sharma wanted to avoid investment jargon, phrasing or compliance talk.

On occasion, this required support from senior leaders within M&G, as it was an entirely new approach to marketing communications for the investment firm.

“The leadership team at M&G have been amazing. They understand that we were trying to create something different. They really helped us to get it across the line.”

Establishing priorities
When Sharma joined, a clutch of new agencies were appointed at the same time. Together, they started work on the strategy for the year ahead. So far, this has been a magnificent illustration of how agencies with different specialisms can pull together to achieve a shared goal.

London-based Camarco was the appointed lead on public relations, All Response Media (ARM) on advertising, Wunderhood for television, and influencer agency, Goat, for digital marketing.

All parties on the delivery side were supported by market research from Flood & Partners to better understand both the audience segments. This was in addition to separate research from Kantar to appreciate how consumers felt about the initial drafts of the creative before launch.

“Everybody needed to follow the timeline,” Sharma recalls. “It was important to keep everyone together and updated so the whole campaign looked like one hymn sheet, but the approach of collaborative working helped the creative development process immensely.”

By December 2022, all agencies were brought together to share the feedback from Kantar and to discuss any necessary adjustments prior to the launch of the out-of-home (OOH) element of the campaign in early 2023.

OOH was traditionally an advertising term for any activity that reached potential buyers outside of the home. This was historically billboard posters or bus stop advertising. More recently, the OOH market has also become more varied, expanding to include advertising on street furniture, at supermarkets, sports grounds and even at medical centres and pubs. On 27 February 2023, the OOH element of the campaign began.

Identifying the target market
“When you start building a brand, you are trying to create awareness and build trust. You need to clearly define your audience, develop the brand’s identity and share your values,” Sharma explains.

For &me, this meant establishing a strong online presence, supported by OOH and television media plans, but it also meant establishing a positive customer experience for clients going to the website or downloading the app for the first time.

The market research for the new joint venture was substantial. It enabled the launch team to divide the consumer investment market down into five, distinct groups. Of these groups, the researchers identified three key consumer categories with a preference for investing without financial advisers or intermediaries. Together, they equated to just over two thirds of the UK population.

The first of the three groups that &me decided to pursue were to become its core market. This group of self- directed investors already had an ISA or a JISA elsewhere, but were found to be interested in joining a new provider, as long as they perceived the provider to be the right fit.

The second group were novice investors without an adviser. The research found there were 2.5 million individuals within this category across the UK. This group have not started investing beyond their work-based pension schemes and they typically are interested in learning more about investing, after substantial volumes of self-directed research.

Finally, there are the “uber investors”, a group of highly competent but knowledgeable individuals, who prefer to make their investments without the input of a financial adviser or intermediary. This group are by far the smallest of the three segmented categories.