Marketing Financial Services
Financial services marketers in Oman face a distinct set of challenges writes George Mikaelian (Managing Director, BOQK) and Tahir Khalil (Associate Director Finance Specialist MENAP), The Nielsen Company

In an increasingly maturing financial services landscape, marketers in Oman need to grapple with many issues simultaneously. These challenges for marketers, whether they provide insurance, banking or wealth management, centre around three key themes:
1.Understanding the needs of your customers and prospective consumers
2.Being able to position your brand(s) and product range in a differentiated and unique way
3.Consistently developing new products and services that address your customers changing needs.

Let’s take them one at a time.

The first challenge “understanding your customers”:
.Requires you to go beyond the industry-accepted lens of age, account balances and household income.
.You need to gain insights into customers’ attitudes, behaviours and future intentions as well.
When you have both the quantitative and qualitative data, it becomes relatively easy to prioritise and target worthwhile market segments.
.Every firm wants to access people with significant assets to invest, but by creating marketing strategies that treat everyone as the same, you may potentially miss the opportunity to best address their individual financial needs.
.In the past, discussions about consumers in the banking market focused on ways to ensure customers chose a particular financial institution or continued to stay with that bank. In a homogeneous market that has relatively similar product offerings, price was often the main variable marketers could tweak.

Today, marketers face an ever-increasing challenge, with increased global competition combined with evolving markets and product proliferation. Discussions about banking consumers now centre on which markets to go after and which products will suit their needs best, i.e. niche marketing! As a result, we see more and more niche marketing strategies being deployed in the region as well as in Oman. The challenge for marketers is to equip themselves with the relevant knowledge and understanding of the market, in order to mitigate any potential risks in their decision.

What you find may surprise you. For example, you may discover that segments that you thought were attractive (such as current customers) may not be profitable to serve, while other seemingly less attractive groups such as the youth or female markets, could be seen as a worthwhile investment for the long term. Interestingly, the youth are fast becoming the majority in Oman*. This coupled with the fact that there has been a dramatic increase in labour force participation rate amongst women in Oman over the last decade, means that these two segments need to be addressed accordingly. Ignore them at your peril.

The second challenge “differentiating your brand and product range”:
This is more difficult in the financial services industry than in some others, since in many cases there are few distinguishing features or benefits to highlight. To oversimplify, one bank’s transaction account is much like the others. Industry leaders, however, are able to find a way to distinguish their brands and product range, make them memorable, and carve out a niche in the otherwise commoditised marketplace through such things as faster transaction times or providing more convenient online account access or new branches, whatever the customer feels is important to them and the particular segment they fall into.

Third challenge “innovate & align”:
Finally, companies have to innovate to constantly respond to customers’ changing needs. For example, consumers are increasingly turning away from the branch network in favour of more remote channels. Firms that have addressed this need for improved remote access should be able to compete in a financial landscape that requires this channel. To be truly innovative financial services organisations, there is the need to be in a position to spot these trends and act on them quickly before the competition has even noticed the opportunity. And when this innovation is aligned to the exact needs of your segment, then financial institutions truly make above industry growth and profits.

We believe that success in the financial services industry can only come from having a system that allows financial institutions to understand their consumers and their changing needs and being able to use this to identify the right segment to target with innovative products or services.
*Source: WAM News Agency, 2007

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