TransformaTion

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Enter the transformational question We kick-started our thought process by questioning the question—was ‘How do we make financial education more palatable and effective’ the right thing to be asking? Rather than begin in the narrow space of financial education and views on retirement, we started at a much higher altitude. We asked everyone we knew—from the mailman to the pizza delivery boy to the stock broker to the soccer mom—something far more fundamental: did they think they were saving as much as they should? A funny thing happened. No matter who we asked, their social stratum or level of financial acumen, we couldn’t find a single person who said yes. What this meant was that whether they were financial black belts or white belts, they all knew enough to want to save more, but weren’t getting there. Then we asked them why they weren’t saving more. Here, the answers were vague, varied, delivered with little conviction and tending toward post-rationalization. In fact the loudest thing in the conversation (and something you need to train your ear to hear if transformational innovation is your calling) was what wasn’t being said at all. No one ever described having made a conscious decision not to save. The big picture, and the transformational question, suddenly snapped into view. In the go-go consumerism of the past few decades, saving had gradually been transformed from a conscious thing to little more than a derivative consequence of dozens of decisions to spend, and the feelings in play in those moments. The problem behind the problem was that saving competes with spending and loses almost every time they go head to head. As simple and obvious as this sounds, it’s actually a profound statement that completely reframed the challenge and approach to this initiative. The shift from ‘how can we make financial education palatable?’ to ‘how can we give saving a fighting chance against spending?’ changed everything about the approach. If you begin to look at spending as your archrival, you see the world differently. Do a SWOT analysis on saving vs. spending and you see that saving is brutally disadvantaged. Spending is impulsive, hedonistic, emotional, instantly gratifying, fun, rewarding to the senses, and irrationally layered with feelings of freedom, power and self-reward. Saving, on the other hand, is premeditated, rational, moralistic, and synonymous with saying no. The transformational question, ‘how can we transform saving to give it a fighting chance against the ubiquitous joys of spending?’, can only be answered through transformation. Not a me-too attempt to educate, but rather a disruptive new model for capturing deposits that imbues saving with the new dimensions of hedonism, impulsiveness, and immediate gratification it needs to make meaningful inroads in day-to-day life in a pleasureseeking society.
CONDITIONAL LOYALTY Flying in the cash-spinning jet stream of the first Frequent Flyer Card launched in 1979, loyalty programs have proliferated across everything from travel to soft drinks to your neighborhood hardware store. And with good reason. The economics of getting the proverbial ‘one more purchase’ from an existing consumer are very sexy. A client at the forefront of the loyalty game engaged us to define their next move, hoping to up the ante over the competition, which had fast-followed their prior innovations and narrowed the gap. They came armed with everything one would ever want to know about the ins and outs of the category’s programs today, and even their customers’ rankings of potential new features they would value most. The client team had brilliantly framed up the possibilities and was equipped with sophisticated modeling techniques, segmentation studies and payout analyses showing how moving the loyalty metrics on various consumer segments would lift company profits. It all seemed poised for a straight march to success, but as we began our consumer discovery phase, talking to the coveted top tier road warriors that loyalty programs were built to woo, we began to detect something in the background that we hadn’t expected at all. Fundamental disdain.
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TransformaTion

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