How Nationwide used AI and social listening to grow mindshare

Nationwide is building its next year’s marketing and communications plan with insights derived from AI-powered social listening.

A session at the Market Research Society’s Storytelling Summit 2025 this week explored how using AI analysis to analyse conversations about money online was reshaping Nationwide’s approach to communicating.

The admittedly broad and “deceptively simple” brief to research agency Verve started with the desire to “grow mindshare” with key audiences, explained Anne Caffrey, Senior Research Manager at Nationwide. This expanded into a project to listen to the conversations across different generations (labelled next gen, families and olders) on social media and find out the commonalities and differences between these cohorts.

Anne noted that while money is quite personal and a source of shame in people’s private lives, they are willing to open up online. These real-time discussions of people’s circumstances are much more “real and raw” than surveying people after the fact. AI allowed Nationwide and partner Verve to see these moments at scale and draw out some key emotions.

Anxiety was the key universal emotion across the three generational cohorts, manifesting for “next gen” for example as the fear of not being able to secure their financial future and hit key milestones. Resentment was another emotion that emerged across social media, whether towards banks and financial institutions or towards other generations.

But there was also a positive outcome – a shared desire to support other people in their emotional and financial stability.

The work was built on through digital video journals with a set of consumers, as well as in-home interviews, which showed how these identified emotions came up in real life.

These insights helped Nationwide to focus on where it could help. The opportunity, Katrien Gunn, Business Director at Verve said, is where people are not communicating.

“The opportunity is for Nationwide to provide tools and space to have these discussions.”

Nationwide’s Anne says that the research was a powerful pivot in how the building society relates to its customers.

“The piece of research moved us from looking at what people are saying about us to what they are saying about money.”

She says this is a much broader space to start from.

“Going back to the brief of how we get more of that mindshare – that has to start with what they are saying about money.”

The other key insight was how much emotion was involved in the discussion of money.

Anne notes that the industry can be very functional and “stiff” in how it talks about what it does. Due to regulation, advice from providers has to be perfect. But in the online space, the discussions are not “perfect”, Anne says.

However great a piece of research, it can be tough to get buy in and activation, she says. In this case, the insights are forming the foundation of its next year’s marketing and communications plans, having now been shared with the building society’s marketing teams and agencies.

After Nationwide’s successful campaign aimed at graduates last year, this will provide “a much sharper blueprint” for where the building society can focus its targeted efforts.