Today’s interview is with Emma Springham, Chief Marketing Officer at TSB, a British retail and commercial bank. I met Emma at Adobe’s Global Summit in Las Vegas after she spoke on the Main Stage. Emma and I talk about the importance of your personal brand in marketing and CX leadership, the pink elephant in the room, what personalisation means for TSB, what they have done to deliver that, what impact it has had, and the importance of speaking the language of your CFO.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Making in-store grocery shopping fun and going viral on TikTok – Interview with David McIntosh of Instacart – and is number 504 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: Today’s episode is sponsored by Qualtrics, ahead of the annual gathering of experience leaders at Qualtrics X4 in London on June 6th. There you can hear about some of the best customer experience programmes from industry leaders and companies including Belron, Allianz and Adidas. You can register now at the Qualtrics website.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Emma:

• I find it surprising that people don’t spend more time thinking about their personal brand.
• It’s really important to spend time thinking about what it is you represent.
• My three words are brave, trust and growth.
• It helps you decide what you stand for, what you’re willing to do and how you go about doing things as well as what you’re not willing to do.
• The FCA’s research has found that nearly 70% of all adults in the UK could at some point or another be classified as being vulnerable.
• Yet, only a small percentage of those people actually would self-identify as being vulnerable.
• TSB’s ‘The elephant in the room’ campaign to get people talking about money was voted marketing campaign of 2023.
• Only one in five people talk about their money worries and that is particularly prevalent amongst men.
• Personalization for TSB means getting the right message to the right customer at the right time.
• It’s about you as an individual, treating you as an individual, and using data to really highlight exactly what we need to say.
• We started with loans and that’s about getting a personalized loan rate to you. But we’ve also started to switch it on for mortgages as well. So we’re looking at mortgages that might be with a different bank and then we’re starting to be able to personalize those communications from a sales point of view.
• When we originally launched personalisation for loans, particularly on the mobile app, we saw a 300 % increase overnight.
• The CFO was definitely looking at those numbers because they started to understand the value of getting the right message to the right customer at the right time.
• Our strategy combines a number of different approaches including where actions trigger personalised journeys and data analysis identifies patterns, opportunities and next best action recommendations.
• The bit of our approach I’m really passionate about is around looking for vulnerable customers that aren’t talking..this is linked to our pink elephant campaign.
• The first area that we’ve looked at is gambling blocks just to see what we can do there and then we’ve also been looking at people with credit cards that don’t have a direct debit set up, which then causes credit scoring issues if they don’t pay on time.
• It’s about protecting that customer and trying to put some safeguards around them.
• The FCA introduced a new set of consumer duty regulations in July of 2023, and many people are approaching it from a quality assurance perspective.
• TSB is doing that as well but we are also thinking more proactively about using data, insight and taking a personalized approach to try and protect people from things that they might have forgotten about and might not know about or just to give them control over different aspects of their financial life.
• I actually led on Consumer Duty in TSB, I led on the consumer understanding work stream, which putting a marketeer in that position was where we started to think about some of the opportunities around how do you support customers etc.
• To get buy-in for the plans that you have, you need to speak the language of your CFO.
• This is an important message because some of these initiatives, they have to be commercially relevant.
• To do that you’ve got to know their style and whether they prefer spreadsheets or presentations etc.
• We have a stakeholder map in my team and we have someone that’s responsible for the marketing budget right and they are then responsible for the relationship with finance.
• It’s also about all levels. It’s not just about the CFO.
• We have regular fortnightly meetings with marketing and finance.
• I’m trying to get to the point where it’s finance that pitch my ideas to the CFO.
• What’s next?
  • We’re at the bedding in stage at the moment with our personalisation efforts.
  • We’ve just rolled out Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) onto our website.
  • It’s been on the mobile channel but we haven’t done any personalization on the web yet.
  • Then it’s working out, how do we get to hyper personalization? That’s our vision and we are focused on how can we deliver personalization across the whole customer lifecycle.

About Emma

Emma Springham is the Chief Marketing Officer at TSB. Emma is a highly accomplished senior executive with 20 years plus extensive experience operating at board level for a variety of brands (TSB, Barclays, NatWest, Allianz, Royal Mail) within complex matrix organisations. A seasoned executive with significant P&L responsibility and a proven track record of success in leading transformational change that has delivered outstanding business performance. An entrepreneurial thinker who demonstrates resilience, adaptability and drive. Her motivational leadership style has allowed her to inspire her teams to deliver excellent results, whilst maintaining an environment based on innovation, coaching and professional integrity.

Check out TSB, say Hi to them on X (Twitter) @TSB and feel free to follow/connect with Emma on LinkedIn here.

Credit: Thanks to TSB for the image.