The competitive and customer forces that drove Selfwealth to its first-ever rebrand – CMO
A sense of positivity, individual empowerment and control, along with a catchcry turning its brand effectively into an adjective, are key elements of Selfwealth’s first rebrand in its 10-year history.
Selfwealth general manager of marketing, Jarrod Purchase, who has been with the group for four years, told CMO he’d been wanting to rebrand for a while. Rapid innovation of the company’s platform, escalating competitive market forces and a doubling of the total addressable market for retail share trading in the last 18 months presented the momentum to finally tackle it.
“It’s the right time for the business, considering the competitive landscape as well. The brand had not been touched in the 10 years we have been in business. A big motivator is therefore refreshing the brand and modernising it,” he said.
Selfwealth’s product is also a far cry from what it was providing even five years ago. The business was initially set up to provide investment insights using data and research, and only introduced share trading in 2017. Today, it’s the fourth largest retail share trading platform in terms of marketshare, according to 2022 figures from Investment Trends. In the past two years, Selfwealth has also increased active traders by 791 per cent to more than 123,000, lifted the value of assets on the platform 669 per cent to $9.3 billion, and grown revenue from $2.8 million to $18.4 million.
In addition, Selfwealth’s competitive landscape is markedly different. Thanks to rapid growth over Covid, category awareness is at an all-time high, and the number and diversity of players entering the fray is up exponentially. The list includes banks, specialists like CMC and CommSec and other retail share trading sites such as Superhero, Stake and Sharesies.
“Ensuring we have a strong brand going forward is important. Name wise and reputation wise, and as the fourth largest in Australia, we are there. But there wasn’t a strong brand identity we could continue to build equity into,” Purchase said. “With only a name to rely on, you don’t get a lot of flexibility for people to associate certain attributes with your brand. We needed to make sure we stand out, get cut through and have decent brand assets.”
Building insight
One of the earliest steps feeding into the rebrand was a research project across Selfwealth’s member base and incorporating a survey of 4000 individuals. Initially undertaken by the product team to help build out the product roadmap, this also gave Selfwealth a better understanding of customer attitudes and behaviours.
“We hadn’t done that kind of research into the customer and everyone internally had a different opinion of the customer. Turns out everyone was right,” Purchase said. “We had six archetypes created off …….