Capital rebranding: LSEG looks ahead

The London Stock Exchange has suffered sharp declines in listings in recent years, in line with a global trend. The CMO of its wider, international group LSEG, Amie Stankiste, sits down with Financial Promoter to talk about reigniting the fire in one of the world’s oldest financial capitals.

Challenging market conditions, rising interest rates, and high inflation have caused a global slump in companies listing on public stock exchanges for the first time – and London has been one of the biggest casualties.

In the third quarter of 2023, just five companies listed in the UK, according to EY data, a fall of 36% on 2022, which was already down on the years leading up to the Covid pandemic.

By comparison, the sluggish global market saw 350 IPO listings in Q3 2023.

The UK government, financial regulator and major industry players have been huddling to take stock and revive the capital’s standing on the world stage, while, in the background, the London Stock Exchange Group launched its global rebrand in September.

With a career spanning 20 years in financial marketing at BNY Mellon, Thomson Reuters, S&P Global Market Intelligence, and Dow Jones, Amie Stankiste, chief marketing officer at LSEG, has a history of transforming high growth businesses.

She has clear motivations and objectives for the multinational group.

“LSEG has been through and is going through a huge transformation,” Stankiste says.

“With the fantastic amount of growth that LSEG has achieved, there needed to be a really strong brand strategy to support that growth and the future vision for the company.”

Despite the decline in IPO activity, Stankiste insists that the multi-million pound rebrand was not done in retaliation – instead, she frames it as a way to simplify LSEG’s multitude of sub-brands.

“The first job was to simplify the brand and the customer experience by streamlining over twenty different sub brands across LSEG,”she says.

LSEG has now refined this to six sub-brands, and has rebranded the entire organisation in line with that new structure.

The exercise ensures “LSEG shows up as one cohesive organisation and customers are able to navigate across the different capabilities and solutions we offer.”

When briefing the rebrand, the group wanted to stand out in a B2C world – not just B2B, and not just financial services, Stankiste adds.

“The campaign not only demystifies LSEG but injects humanity into the brand, a kind of warm personality, and a little bit of intelligent wit as well.

“We wanted to capture that emotive side of doing business with LSEG to introduce who we are,” she says.

The one-minute brand video, the hero asset of the campaign, has raked in around 70 million views, with a further estimated 600 million views through global digital adverts.

“We took a multimedia approach to the campaign: taking over billboards and transport hubs. We wrapped trams in Hong Kong and taxis in London with our ads and we also went live on TV and we sponsored podcasts,” says Stankiste.

“We really thought about these global channels and made sure that they were the right targeted audience for our campaign, but also that we were able to really drive brand awareness – that was the first objective of the campaign.”

Measuring ROI

Launching a multi-million pound rebrand in a distressed market was a bold move, and LSEG’s marketing team had a comprehensive strategy to evaluate return on investment.

“We’ve measured ourselves around three key factors: brand awareness, brand familiarity, and purchase intent,” says Stankiste.

The approach is also three-pronged, across different timescales.

“The short-term measures of the success of the campaign are: what engagement are we seeing across the world around this campaign? How is that translating into upticks in Google searches for LSEG? How is that translating into actual visitors on our website and the dwell time on our website?”

According to Stankiste, all those stats have gone through the roof. “These short-term measures are indicators of success,” she says.

Medium-term measures include LSEG’s annual brand survey and reviewing purchase intent – the likelihood of people doing business with LSEG over the next year – which will be reviewed over the coming months.

“In the longer term, our internal customer insights and analytics team support us with a lot of quantitative measures,” Stankiste adds.

“They are building a marketing mix model, which is essentially a regression model that can isolate certain factors to determine what is influencing financial growth.

“They’ll look at the company results, and then isolate certain factors and come to conclusions as to what’s driving the growth.”

LSEG has also promoted the rebrand internally through an internal launch event to its 25,000 employees around the world.

“It was able to really captivate that audience and make brand champions out of every single person that works at LSEG. “That gave us a launch pad that was incredibly powerful to then go to market externally with the campaign the next day,” she says.

London’s fighting chance

Most brands change their corporate identities every seven to ten years, according to research by branding company Voyage Branding.

The London Stock Exchange Group, however, rebranded to LSEG in 2020 after its $27bn acquisition of Refinitiv, winning a Red Dot Award for brand transformation in the process.

Another global rebrand only three years on indicates that LSEG is eager to reposition itself in the market.
The one-minute brand video delivered four key messages to demystify the brand in a very simplistic way, with one message revolving around location.

“There is a misconception that LSEG is only based in London. We showed key locations in the ad, such as the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower, for example, which were very clear visuals that demonstrate that we are truly global and do business in 190 markets around the world,” says Stankiste.

By highlighting LSEG’s global reach, the group shifts its focus away from the dampened IPO market in London, labelling the London Stock Exchange as one of its “important sub-brands” rather than its primary focus.

Stankiste further distances LSEG from the global listings drought by mitigating the issue, advising that “the London Stock Exchange is not just IPOs” but is focusing on its successful funding continuum.

“London is a fantastic financial centre and we are doing a lot of work to engage with customers, stakeholders, and regulators around the world to help to drive the continued success of the UK’s capital markets,” she says.

With the CEO of the London Stock Exchange, Julia Hogget, “working incredibly hard behind the scenes and across the markets to help to drive more positive activity in the market, amid a challenging economic backdrop,” the group continues to fight back against the cloud sitting atop global equity capital markets.

The outlook for 2024 seems much more positive, with LSEG reporting heightened profits and a successful marketing campaign.

Global market activity is also beginning to build pace, with significant improvements in post-IPO share price performance towards the end of 2023.

LSEG’s global brand campaign – still being delivered across the globe months after its launch – suggests the momentum won’t cease.

This article is taken from the Winter 2024 print edition of Financial Promoter.

Want to hear more from Amie Stankiste? Find her on the stage at this year’s FP Live! on 18 March. Click here to buy tickets.