Summit Heads: Stake CMO to ‘paint the picture’ of economic environment at next week’s Finance Marketing Summit

Bryan Wilmot is the chief marketing officer at Stake, one of Australia’s leading investment platforms.

Since becoming the first marketing hire at the company in 2019, he has been pivotal in leading the company through a period of rapid growth, with over 500,000 customers.

Ahead of Mumbrella’s Finance Marketing Summit next week, Wilmot answered a few questions about how he operates, and what he hopes attendees will get out of his presentation.

Marketers within the financial services industry are navigating choppy waters. How are you staying focused on the customer experience?   

For us, it’s really just about, like with any good brand, understanding your customer deeply – as many different types of inputs that you can assemble to create that single, comprehensive view of your customer, whether that’s from a qualitative standpoint, or in terms of what they’re feeling — and what they’re concerned about in the macro environment and generally when it comes to money — all the way down to what they’re doing and what type of products they’re actually interacting with, helps to paint that picture.

So really, it’s just about trying to represent the voice of your customer in the business. That’s what gives you the clarity on what to focus on.

You were the first marketing hire at Stake, and the company’s grown rapidly since then. What’s been the most surprising thing about having to manage that growth?

A really interesting thing coming into the business for me was coming into a startup with high growth ambitions. Obviously we’re in financial services, but you have half the financial services DNA, and then you’ve also got half the startup industry DNA.

Especially if you think back to 2019, when things were absolutely flying and ‘growth at all costs’ was kind of the playbook, what’s been really interesting for us, is that we always take the brand-first approach.

I think there’s a lot of practice out there, which is really valid and works quite well in consumer brands, of advertising, being acquisition-focused, and focused on short-term sales.

But for us — and it’s probably as a result of my background being in brand strategy and creative agencies — we’ve always prioritised the value of brand. I think we’re really starting to see, especially as things have gotten tougher in the macro environment, the value of brands, and how investing in your brand over the long term pays dividends, and the stability that it can give you, and the creative nature of that investment over time.

Reflecting on the early days, there was always this slight tension in the business, of ‘how much should we be investing in brand?’ versus ‘What are we doing in digital?’ ‘How many customers are we just getting through the door today?’

It’s been an amazing journey to be on, and see the fruits of that labour and that investment in the brand — but really a validation of all of the stuff that the likes of Byron Sharp and the likes of Les Binet and Peter Field espouse, coming to life in real time.

Your background includes working with major brands like Diageo, Woolworths, and McDonald’s. How has that shaped the way you operate at Stake? 

I think the most important thing that I learned in creative agencies and working with brands like that was how to think about the customer and really how to think strategically about what you do — using marketing tactics as a lever and not as the primary.

So, it really gave me a great stomping ground to understand how to develop brand, and how to think about the customer. And I applied that, but it was an interesting culture shift at the very beginning. The first 12 months, my mantra was ‘forget everything’, because I went from working on brands like those you mentioned, with the budgets that come with those brands, to having $5,000-a-month budget: pretty much all we could afford to do is run a little bit of digital.

So it was really almost like going, ‘I need to just forget the default of big spend and like all that sort of stuff and learn how to foster the same outcomes, but in a much more low scale, organic sense’, like really focusing on that same idea of ‘understanding the customer’. Whereas, in a big agency, you’re doing focus groups and doing these big research projects with Kantar.

I was literally going to breakfast with six customers once a month and just talking to them. Calling people on the phone, actual customers, and just being, you know, ‘How’s your week been? What can we do? What are you thinking about?’ Just in the trenches.

The mechanics of understanding the customer, and using that to inform how you think about your brand was the blueprint, but the way that that was manifesting was very different, purely from a size and scale perspective.

You’re speaking at the Finance Marketing Summit. What insights do you hope attendees take with them?

The story that I’m going to try to tell is really to try to paint the picture of what ambitious Australians — those that are really trying to progress and grow their wealth — what they’re feeling.

It’s definitely a tough economic environment for people, and I think a lot of people are feeling stuck. What I’m going to try to communicate is a bit of an insight in terms of how people are thinking about moving forward and what they’re having to do these days to realise the progress that — probably ten, twenty years ago — felt a lot simpler to achieve.

I hope that people take away a realistic viewpoint on what people are actually feeling out there.

I think with marketers at times, the risk you run is that you exist in your bubble of the Eastern Suburbs or whatever it is, and you have that Walsh Bay, Bondi mindset of the world. And, so I hope that that’s a great day of discussion about the reality of what consumers and investors out there are thinking and feeling.

The Mumbrella Finance Marketing Summit takes place 25 July, 2024 at 12-Micron Sydney. Get your tickets here.

Nathan Jolly

Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.

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topics Bryan WilmotMumbrella Finance Marketing Summitstake

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