Phoenix is looking to make its marketing more efficient with its new restructure, the firm’s new Group Brand and Marketing Director explains.
Earlier this month, Phoenix Group announced it was making major changes to its marketing department, creating a more centralised function under the leadership of Ben Rhodes in this newly created role.
Ben explains that since he joined in 2021, Phoenix has been transforming into a purpose-led business at the corporate level. The firm uses a master brand architecture, which it launched in 2022, through which it emphasises that sub-brands like Standard Life are part of the Phoenix Group.
“Obviously that faces into our shareholder audiences and what we call future talent to be able to recruit people. But right at the heart of our enterprise strategy is this desire to change the system, because we don’t think it is set up well for customers.”
He highlights for example the pensions savings gap, with 67% of people not saving enough for retirement.
“It’s very important that a company the size of Phoenix is leaning into addressing those issues.”
The Phoenix brand therefore has to appeal not only to customers, advisors and distributors but also to audiences that it is attempting to influence to change regulation and legislation and create more of a level playing field for customers.
“So it’s quite important to us that there’s a degree of control over how the brand is positioned and its share of voice in the market.”
“We have to deliver the commercial strategy, but also have to support our corporate objectives.”
Ben says much has been achieved in terms of infusing the spirit, purpose and values of Phoenix into the brands and business units. This restructure is in some ways, he says, an inevitable evolution. As a company built through acquisitions, Phoenix has picked up what Ben refers to as different “stove pipes” of capability in each brand.
The changes see brand across the portfolio being managed by a central team as opposed to the existing structure where a central team issues guidelines that are enforced by individual teams at each of the sub-brands.
Channel marketing teams have in turn been moved closer to the individual business units to provide revenue-generating growth marketing.
The marketing services function that previously sat in Standard Life has also now come to the central marketing organisation. This provides creative services, marketing technology and platforms that the marketing teams need to make use of.
Ben suggests these changes were not planned since the beginning, but are a natural evolution.
“There’s always a drive around being as efficient as possible and making sure you haven’t got duplication happening.
“I suppose there would be an inevitability around asking do we need to have as many teams, or can we create a stronger function or functions with fewer.”
He notes that brand building and performance marketing are intrinsically linked, but the skills, activities, consistency and budgets required for brand are very different to operating in the channels.
“[Channels are] much more product-focused, although not exclusively, and much more about people who are in market now and making sure you’ve got the right propositions to meet their requirements now.”
The channel teams are there, he says, to help heads of business units deliver their in-year numbers.
By contrast, “the brand team is there to make sure that in three years’ time, we can hit the growth targets that we need to because we’ve built the brand with those future audiences – so as we approach them on a yearly basis, they’re much warmer to our proposition.”
He adds: “For me, brand building is about future customers and de-risking future cash flows. Depending on what category or channel you’re operating in, it’s probably everything that has an impact six months or a year from now. It’s not things that happen now.”
The key to growing a brand, he says, is consistency of investment and consistency in market but that can be challenging when you’re in a monthly trading environment where you’re pushing hard to deliver bottom line results.
So where will the marketing services restructure be most impactful?
“I think we’re going to look at the end-to-end operating model of how we do marketing across the business, how we do marketing services around that and make sure we’ve got an operating model that has the flexibility and agility that we need to have.
“You always start the year with a plan of what you want to do, but some things become disproportionately more important, so you need to have an in-built flexibility to lean into the opportunities as they arise.”
A chance for the new structure to show its value will be next year, as Standard Life has its 200th anniversary coming up.
“Internally it’s been important, but heritage and legacy are quite important in our market. So we’ll be looking to celebrate that. One of the things I’m really excited about doing is being able to really leverage a lot of our thought leadership.”
The idea is to make use of the things that are being done across the group and put that into all the brands rather than brands doing different activities.
“We’re trying to get that equity flowing across the group so that we can make the best use of everything that we’re up to.”
