Being a challenger brand is built upon holding firm and steady to a belief that something is wrong in the market place, and being prepared to disrupt the status quo to effect change. That is the premise of the Challenger Brand Identity project at Charles Schwab & Co., which launched 3 ½ years ago and has squarely impacted customer engagement and brand loyalty.
Julian Aldridge, VP, Brand Evangelism and Activation, Charles Schwab talked about this impressive project during his session, Which Wall Does the Brand Go On?, on Tuesday at the Engagement & Experience Expo, hosted by Loyalty360.
Challenger brands communicate efficiently; they’re trusted; they’re valuable, they’re transparent, accountable, and do what they say they’ll do.
How do you create emotional value as a small brand?
“Challenger brands lead with their beliefs,” Aldridge explained. “They slay monsters. They strategically break conventions and sacrifice ruthlessly. When we look at disrupting, we’re doing it to promote our client promoter scores, which are up 50% in past four years. I’m a huge believer in Net Promoter Score because it’s such a simple metric. Do your existing clients recommend you or not? We call it Client Promoter Score, but it’s basically NPS. I think it’s one of the best tests to see if a business is doing things right?”
Entering the cultural conversation is critical for a challenger brand, Aldridge noted. After CVS officials eliminated all tobacco products 18 months ago, its same-store sales jumped 16%.
“CVS believed if it was serious about being in the health care business, let’s be upfront about it,” Aldridge said.
What does Schwab stand for?
“The Wall is the Brand,” Aldridge said. “The Brand is the Wall. Every Wall all the time.”
Aldridge joined the company in 2012 to drive the Challenger Brand Identity project and help Charles Schwab & Co. rediscover and activate its rich Challenger heritage for a new generation of investors.
During his 30 years in the advertising and marketing industry, Aldridge has worked across virtually every category imaginable, and with iconic brands like Nike, DHL, Miller, adidas, Coke, and Disney.
Aldridge is recognized as the founder of ‘planning for the digital marketing agency era’ with his pioneering work at Red Sky Interactive during the first dotcom boom, and as one of the originators of the discipline of Influencer Marketing during his six-year stint at the helm of Ammo Marketing, the original Influencer Marketing Agency.
“One of the misnomers is that to be a challenger you’ve got to be a startup, you’ve got to be David vs. Goliath,” Aldridge said. “When, in fact, all you have to do is have a fundamental belief that there is something wrong in the market place, and be prepared to disrupt things in order to create change. That change is often on behalf of an underserved or poorly served customer.”
Schwab has a global tagline: Own Your Tomorrow.
“Part of that is going back to the fundamental beliefs,” Aldridge explained. “At the beginning of the Challenger Brand Project at Charles Schwab, we looked back at the literature and articles that Chuck had written or was quoted in. There were some simple fundamentals throughout. In the early days, he talked about turning wage earners into owners. He talked about challenging a model that discouraged Main Street from benefiting from Wall Street, and he and Schwab have been true to that ever since.”
Schwab always needed to be a challenger brand, Aldridge said.
“It’s much more about the philosophy of taking hold of your future, making small sacrifices today to create a better tomorrow,” Aldridge said. “Investing in something bigger is fundamental to who we are as a company. When Chuck founded Schwab 43 years ago, Wall Street was dominated by big institutions. He set out to disrupt that model to open up Wall Street to Main Street. And that’s really been a premise since the very beginning. Ever since then, Schwab has been at the cutting edge or very close, in terms of using technology, sometimes strategic thinking on behalf of the investor, which has been disrupting the market. It’s been the heritage and part of the DNA of the company, from the products, services, attitude, and how we deploy that kind of marketing. Now, Schwab’s Intelligent Portfolios make professional advisory services available to anyone with $5,000 to invest.”
Being a disrupter is central to the work Charles Schwab & Co. has conducted, especially in the past 3 ½ years.
“This has been central to the work we’ve been doing for the past 3 ½ years, figuring out how we can do better across the whole organization,” Aldridge said. “We are now 14,500 people across seven major sites in the U.S. and internationally. Obviously, it’s a large organization with multiple layers and multiple business units. When we started our challenger journey, our focus was on unearthing what’s always been at the very center of our belief system, and how to make it relevant to today’s investor, or would-be investor. Out of that strategic process came our tagline: Own Your Tomorrow, which has become a central marketing platform around which everything is built, across every business unit.”
Schwab’s assets under management grew from $2 trillion to $2.5 trillion in the past three years since the campaign launched.
Turning toward the future, Aldridge borrowed a running metaphor to explain Schwab’s vision.
“This is a marathon, not a sprint,” he said. “Marathon runners break the race down into 26 one-mile increments. We look at each individual project as part of the whole. We will place a small number of small bets across a number of initiatives and measure the hell out of everything. Those are the ones we double down on. We learn from our successes, from our failures, and it allows us to continue to be disruptive. Critically though, this is a journey, and as Nike often says, there is no finish line. Disruption is a mindset, and it takes constant fostering, constant support and constant proof points to thrive–regardless of the size of the organization.”