Your financial skills matter
Leading German savings bank Sparkasse has recently activated a video campaign across Facebook to highlight the support it can offer customers with financial literacy as their banking partner.
Read on to join Susanne Marohn, Head of Campaign, and Ansis Schön, Head of Strategy and Consulting, as they talk to us about the role of brands in supporting financial literacy.
What motivated you to undertake a campaign around financial literacy?
Susanne: Children across Germany start their financial journey with a Sparkasse savings account and many turn to us at important moments like buying a home.
We are a household name across Germany, everybody recognises us and our trust metrics are high. This makes it even more crucial that we act upon our ethos of making our customers lives better—words are not enough. And this is why financial literacy is an important campaign for us.
Our history and heritage doesn’t mean we rest on our laurels—we are always doing more and innovating to best serve our customers. Making our customers’ lives better motivates us everyday and this campaign is a part of making that ethos real.
We want everyone in Germany to be able to shape their own lives through adequate financial provision—regardless of their income, assets or status. Financial literacy helps us to create a strong foundation for this to happen.
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We learnt that financial literacy is something that reaches hearts and minds.
Ansis: Importantly, our motivations for the campaign are driven by both consumer demand and the passion of Sparkasse to support customers so they have the financial skills they need.
The topic of financial literacy is strongly anchored in our sense of social responsibility, but this is reinforced by customer insight, which shows that Germany has a larger financial literacy gap than other European countries. We want to help close this. It is much more than a marketing campaign. We feel obliged as a business to help those we serve build their financial literacy.
How does financial literacy fit into your marketing strategy?
Susanne: Our marketing strategy is largely driven by our mission "to make people's lives better." So running a campaign around financial literacy was an easy decision and very much aligned with our strategy.
Our marketing isn’t focused on products, but on telling stories that are relevant to the lives of our consumers. The goal is to remain the number one financial partner for German consumers and we had specific measures for the campaign tied to brand impact, as well as sales.
What did you learn from running the campaign?
Susanne: The campaign creatives focused on five key topics around our customers’ needs: family, everyday life, living at home, work and life abroad, and the future. We learnt that by using examples from the everyday lives of our customers, they could see that the campaign was relevant to people just like them.
We answered important questions about financial literacy and at the same time, positioned Sparkasse as a partner that is able to answer their questions. Overall, the campaign reached over 1.5 million people with particularly strong performance when it came to brand recall.
Ansis: Essentially, we learnt that financial literacy is something that reaches hearts and minds. It’s a topic that consumers are conscious of, but sometimes not sure how to handle. This means they were keen to engage with our content and take the steps needed to support the development of their own financial literacy.
When it comes to specific results, the campaign's playout via Facebook and Instagram has been really impactful.
We were able to reach our target audience of women, with the post-campaign evaluation showing that 34.9% felt Sparkasse provides the right answers to money questions.
you’ve already undertaken?
Susanne: We believe that banks and financial service providers have a responsibility to play their part in improving consumer knowledge about financial literacy, and the right financial services product can make a difference to customers’ everyday lives.
Carrying out work in this area can also benefit how customers perceive your brand—having a positive effect on customer satisfaction and loyalty. It’s a commitment to build the knowledge of your customers and be their long-term financial partner.
Ansis: There is always more that can be done to grow financial literacy and empower consumers. But one brand can’t do this alone.
If more brands focused time, energy and resource in this area, society as a whole would benefit. There is also collective work to be done, bringing brands, policy makers and educators together to get the job done.
Building brand equity and trust through supporting customers with their financial literacy is a possibility if brands take their role in educating consumers seriously and take action.
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