Situation

The financial service firm historically served as a “challenger’ brand to traditional brokerages and gained a loyal following for its customer centricity. However, Schwab’s innovations, e.g. low-priced trades, were copied in an increasingly competitive environment.

The company’s website became a critical vehicle for communicating what Charles Schwab offers and how it is different. The website was dense and difficult to navigate, making it hard to differentiate and epitomize Schwab’s brand promise.

 

Task

The Schwab website needed to be revamped to better compete with other firms and serve as a stronger customer acquisition vehicle.

I led the pitch team to win the project and then led the implementation of the project.

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What I did

My first step was overseeing primary and secondary marketing research, but the research only uncovered generic findings, such as the already generally known triggers that prompt people to change financial services. Interesting data, but not breakthrough.

 

As a result, I challenged the team (composed of a wide variety of disciplines and seniority levels) to get to the heart of what people think about—and feel—when they manage their money, and then led design-thinking exercises to explore how to apply those emerging insights.

 

What surfaced was that even “financially literate” people have lots of questions, are worried that they will appear “stupid” asking those questions, and are subsequently frustrated when financial service companies offer mumbo-jumbo answers or legally-driven qualifications/obfuscations. Building on those insights, I carefully probed the team on what else was in play, e.g. cultural considerations, and then led the team through ideation exercises to explore “what might Schwab do?” The result was the unifying idea to bring to life how to ask tough questions and clearly show how Schwab embraces those questions with straightforward and clear answers.

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