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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK
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Branded borrowing on the increase
July 11, 2008
Searches for key borrowing related terms such as ‘mortgages’, ‘credit cards’, and ‘loans’ are in decline thanks to the credit crunch. They haven’t dried up completely, but the shrinking of the pie means that search marketers need to be even savvier in order to pick up traffic from the remaining searches.
One way that banks and other providers can distinguish their offerings from the pack is through branding. In order to understand the importance of brand in the financial services world, we created six search term portfolios including one of branded (e.g. tesco credit card’ or ‘natwest loans’) and one of generic (e.g. compare credit cards’, ‘interest free credit cards’, ‘personal loans’, ‘100% mortgages’) search terms related to credit cards, mortgages and loans.
The chart above shows that generic searches are more popular than branded searches across all three categories. However, there have been clear declines in searches for the generic term but little change in searches for the branded terms. The gap between generic and branded searches has been closing over the past three years, and in fact in the credit card world they have been level for the last couple of months.
Looking at credit cards, we found that searches for the singular ‘credit card’ term were much more popular than the plural ‘credit cards’ when it came to generic terms. However, when you look at branded terms, the opposite is true. Looking at the top three brands in our branded credit card portfolio in the table below, the term, ‘tesco credit card’ receives 17 times more searches than its plural term, while for Virgin and Capital One the ratios are six and seven respectively.
As the table below illustrates this is not the case in the loan market, and there are over three times as many searches for ‘tesco loans’ as ‘tesco loan’. It’s also interesting to see that Tesco is not alone as a supermarket in having a strong brand in the financial services market: Asda appears in both the credit card and loan lists, while Sainsbury’s is also included in the loans top 10.
Posted by Robin Goad at 08:00 AM
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In Categories Branding | Financial Services | Search
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