Summary
- Many banks struggle to turn brand health insights into practical actions that drive real impact.
- The strongest brand value comes from authentic, unprompted customer behaviors – loyalty, advocacy, and long-term engagement – rather than traditional brand perception metrics.
- By analyzing critical customer life journeys, banks can identify the moments that matter most and strategically improve their brand at every stage.
The Challenge: Turning Brand Health Insights into Action
Understanding how customers perceive a bank is important – but knowing how to use that insight is where many institutions get stuck, like we discussed in The Emotional Disconnect: The Lens to Hyper-Personalization in Banking. Most rely on third-party research firms to assess their reputation, measuring factors like trust, transparency, and advocacy. And, while these studies offer valuable data, they often focus on reflexive metrics – what customers do for the bank, like Net Promoter Scores (NPS).
But true brand strength isn’t about how customers score a bank on a survey. It’s about how they behave when no one’s asking – do they stay loyal? Recommend the bank to others? Expand their financial relationship over time? Research from McKinsey highlights that loyal customers generate up to 10 times more revenue over their lifetime compared to new customers. This level of commitment stems from a deep trust in the brand, built over time.
To foster this trust, banks need to shift their mindset. Instead of treating brand health as a reflection of customer sentiment alone, they need to focus on reciprocal value – aka how well they contribute to their customers’ financial wellbeing.
From Reflexive to Reciprocal: A Shift in Thinking
Consumers may distrust the financial industry as a whole, yet they often feel differently about their primary bank. The 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer found that while trust in the banking sector remains low, people tend to trust the institutions they engage with directly. This reinforces a critical insight: local impact matters more than broad industry perception – “me before we”.
Local impact typically falls into two areas:
- The buying experience: How smooth, transparent, and trustworthy the process feels when customers engage with a bank’s products and services.
- The engagement experience: The ongoing relationship and support a customer receives, beyond individual transactions.
Under this premise, banks continue to fail to understand that they are a means to an end, and that end is not its products and services, but instead specific life outcomes like buying a home, everyday peace of mind, affording fun and enjoyment, etc. In fact, research from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) found that 73% of customers agreed that they would value a bank that helped them achieve personal goals such as buying a home, saving for education, or planning for retirement.
A life-centric view of end-to-end journeys pushes banks to think of value and thereby reputation from the lens of the human behind the customer and the pursuit of their personal financial wellbeing. In turn, they reciprocate with their loyalty and advocacy increasing brand health.
From Insights to Action: Making Brand Health Data Work
Third-party research firms claim to offer “actionable insights,” but most deliver broad, thematic conclusions. Banks need a more layered approach – combining high-level brand perception data with specific customer experience insights. With that said, there is no single silver bullet study that can take you from the higher altitudes of the brand to the lower altitudes of specific actions. Like layers in a cake, it takes an amalgamation of studies to get to real actionability.
In short, a well-structured research strategy should connect macro brand reputation studies with micro-level customer experiences. Without this connection, insights remain abstract and difficult to act on.
Illustrative Example
| Key Question | Research Focus | Altitude Markers | Typical Data Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| What is the overall value of our brand? | Brand reputation & awareness | 30,000 ft. | Third-party benchmarking |
| What makes customers trust or distrust us? | Trust & brand perception | 20,000 ft. | Reputation studies |
| What keeps customers engaged? | Loyalty & engagement drivers | 10,000 ft. | Internal surveys & behavioral data |
| How do our services impact relationships? | Product & channel experience | 5,000 ft. | Transactional & service analytics |
| What do customers hope to achieve? | Life outcomes & financial goals | 1,000 ft. | Specialized customer studies |
| Where do customers face challenges? | Friction & satisfaction points | 1 ft. | Experience-led data tracking |
By linking brand perception data with real customer experiences, banks can move beyond generic brand health scores and pinpoint the exact moments where they need to improve.
Case Study: Bank ABC’s Home Mortgage Initiative
To understand how this shift from reflexive to reciprocal value works in practice, consider the case of Bank ABC, who aims to expand in California through greater home loan volume. Through brand health studies, Bank ABC learns that it has low awareness and brand equity in the state. Its brand health metrics reflect both reflexive and reciprocal influences, but the bank struggles to translate these findings into actionable strategies.
Through internal research, Bank ABC uncovers that the home buying journey—not just the mortgage process—is a critical life event that deeply influences brand health as for many it’s the first major financial decision the person makes. Customers’ perceptions of the bank are shaped by factors like transparency, trust, and ease of the buying experience, rather than just the terms of the mortgage itself.
The bank’s customer experience team creates an experience-led data architecture that is an analytical mirror of the entire home-buying journey, from initial awareness to first loan payment. This in-context data visibility helps identify specific moments that matter to customers, highlighting friction points that negatively impact the journey. Business leaders are able to understand exactly where customers are dropping off or feeling dissatisfied in real-time.
By implementing data-driven, experience-led solutions, Bank ABC strengthens its brand health in California and builds a reputation for transparency and customer-first service in the competitive mortgage market.
Final Thoughts: The Future of Brand Health in Banking
Measuring brand health isn’t enough. Banks must shift to a life-centric approach, understanding and improving the key moments that shape customer perception. By embedding analytics into real-life financial journeys, banks can translate insights into strategic, high-impact actions that drive long-term loyalty and growth.
Looking to take a customer-centric, data-driven approach to brand health? Let’s talk. At Cortico-X, we specialize in helping financial institutions turn insights into measurable impact. If you found this content interesting, please follow Cortico-X on LinkedIn for more information on experience-driven transformation.
Anson Vuong
is the Vice President of the Financial Services practice at Cortico-X. He helps financial institutions orchestrate complex customer and employee experiences that drive quantifiable business value.
