In this episode of the Financial Marketing Insights podcast, Christoph Woermann, Chief Marketing Officer of the Corporate Bank and former Global Head of Brand at Deutsche Bank, outlined his approach to brand management, highlighting the strategic importance of aligning brand, strategy, and culture.

Christoph Woermann serves as the CMO of Deutsche Bank's Corporate Bank, which is one of the four main business lines of Deutsche Bank. The Corporate Bank caters to a diverse range of clients, from small businesses in Germany to large multinational companies worldwide. Additionally, the Corporate Bank extends its services to banks and other financial institutions.

In the past year, Christoph took on the role of Global Head of Brand, overseeing Deutsche Bank's overall brand positioning. With 33 years at Deutsche Bank, Christoph brings a wealth of experience, having witnessed various phases of the bank's evolution. He explains that reshaping a brand goes beyond campaigns or new corporate designs; it's about aligning the company's purpose with its vision for the next decade, and integrating this with the group's overall strategy and desired corporate culture.

Christoph explains that brand alignment involves distilling the company's vision and strategy into a cohesive brand promise for the market. He emphasises that creating a new tagline, slogan, or brand identity needs to feels like a natural progression of the company's story. Over the past year, Christoph's additional role has focused on this comprehensive brand alignment. Currently, they are in the testing phase and anticipate rolling out the new brand elements soon.

The importance of teamwork

Christoph emphasized that branding is never the result of a single person's efforts but a collective endeavor involving various departments and stakeholders.

Reflecting on his role, Christoph noted the critical role of the strategy office and a newly created team dedicated to aligning marketing units, including the brand function. This centrally coordinated team worked closely with internal communications groups and even sought external advice to ensure they stayed on the right path. The collaboration aimed to bring together the necessary knowledge and perspectives to effectively shape the brand.

Christoph explained that branding cannot be seen in isolation; it must be integrated with the company’s overall strategy. This involves understanding the current strategy, consulting with HR and employer branding, and determining the company’s position in its journey. From this comprehensive understanding, a cohesive plan is developed that includes both sequential and parallel efforts to achieve faster results.

He highlighted the effectiveness of parallel swim lanes, a strategy that proved particularly valuable during the COVID-19 pandemic. This approach allowed multiple initiatives to be pursued simultaneously, expediting outcomes in a large organization where traditional processes can be slow.

Christoph underscored that rolling out core initiatives requires more than a few announcements. It necessitates a carefully planned journey to familiarize the organization with the brand’s evolution, explaining its origins, future aspirations, and the steps needed to achieve those goals. This process involves building a community of ambassadors to champion the new identity and ensure its integration throughout the company.

In essence, Christoph’s insights reveal that successful branding relies on strategic collaboration, alignment with company goals, and meticulous planning. These efforts ensure that the brand promise is authentically delivered through day-to-day behaviors and communicated effectively to both internal and external audiences.

“Whenever you roll out something that is core to a company, you cannot just do this by a few announcements and then expect that it embeds in a company. You need to plan that journey, how you familiarize an organization with: where do I come from, where do I want to be and how do I get there?”

Unleashing the power of people

Christoph emphasized that any successful speech or presentation begins with thorough research into the audience's background, motivations, and current challenges.

In the context of branding, it's essential to recognize the diversity of cultures and identify pain points within the organization. Christoph pointed out that uncovering these elements can help shape the new brand. This process involves assessing the current landscape and understanding the responsibilities of different stakeholders. While defining the company's purpose and vision is a senior management responsibility, aligning this vision with the company's culture requires input from a broad array of employees.

Christoph shared that Deutsche Bank developed its cultural aspirations in collaboration with hundreds of stakeholders, rather than in isolation with a small group of insiders. This inclusive approach is crucial because change often brings discomfort. To navigate this, it's important to communicate the target and purpose clearly, ensuring that employees understand the vision and are willing to endure the transitional period.

One common mistake in these kind of exercises, according to Christoph, is the abrupt imposition of a new culture without acknowledging the existing one. Instead, it's vital to articulate the vision and strategy while taking into account the current culture and individual perspectives. Understanding that different cultures interpret questions differently—some as commands, others as inquiries or challenges—is essential in this process.

Bringing together people who are willing to support the new direction is also crucial. This approach fosters an environment where the brand can evolve naturally, reflecting the true essence of the organization.

“You need to understand where people come from. You need to build pockets of people who are willing to become an ambassador. And most crucially, you also have to have a bit of trust that the outcome might not be a hundred percent as you have figured it, because the moment you relinquish control, and you just give side planks, and say, these are things that we don't cross, but between these side planks, you can develop something new - you will unleash the collective power of people.”

Understanding your Brand Identity

In discussing the essence of brand identity, Christoph emphasizes that a brand is defined by customer perceptions and external audience beliefs. He highlights the importance of internal alignment and motivation to ensure that the external brand promise—whether a claim or tagline—truly reflects the company's behaviors. This ensures consistency between what is promised and what is delivered.

Christoph explains that understanding a brand's current position is crucial. This involves assessing how the brand is perceived by its audience and aligning this perception with the company's core value proposition.

“That's the same with when people ask me about a personal brand and I say, you know, just because we're talking about personal brand, it's not that you don't have one and you need to build one. You have one. The moment you, you exist, you have one. So a company, even if you don't have a sort of specific claim or whatever, you have a brand - you need to find out how people see you, for what are they using you?”

Companies need to understand how they are perceived and use this insight to align their brand with their values, while also identifying and correcting any misperceptions.

To illustrate, Christoph provides an example from Deutsche Bank. He notes that it is critical to avoid creating false expectations about the company's capabilities, such as serving small local businesses outside of Germany, where Deutsche Bank does not have a branch presence. This underscores the need for a clear and accurate brand promise that highlights the bank's distinct capabilities without misleading customers.

In the banking industry, where many services are similar, Christoph points out that differentiation comes from honing in on specific capabilities. He discusses the importance of understanding the brand's position—whether as a regional, global, or local player—and ensuring that its value is clearly communicated and delivered by employees and perceived by clients. He emphasizes that branding is a continuous journey, requiring iterative refinement and evolution rather than abrupt changes.

“You need to see how, in which category are you slotting yourself in? What is your specific value? How is it currently delivered by your employees as perceived by your clients? And then you iterate. With this, brands are always journeys and you need to understand that when you rebrand - you should not make the mistake of almost indirectly saying, forget what we said till yesterday. It’s a journey, you need to show an evolution.”

B2B Brands in Financial Services

Christoph explains that the big difference between business-to-business (B2B) financial services, even if parts of the business are directed to private clients, and the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) industry, is the emphasis on marketing and brand investment. In the FMCG industry, companies invest a significant part of their revenues into their brands, recognizing that this investment is central to their personality.

In contrast, banks, which do not sell tangible products, often see marketing and branding as a “cost to achieve,” leading to questions about the immediate return on investment. He notes that the consumer industry understands that building brand awareness is a journey and provides an example of Unilever’s Dove line, which created a new category through exceptional branding, communication, and marketing.

Christoph acknowledges that banks also prefer carving out a relatable identity for their customers. He highlights part of Deutsche Bank’s purpose statement that talks of the “lasting success of our clients,” which implies a longer, more intimate relationship rather than a transactional one.

“Longer relationships means familiarity. Longer relationships means intimacy. So when we are talking about an expression that we say we like to call ourselves the ‘Global HausBank’. House bank doesn't normally mean or only mean your main bank. I don't invite strangers to my house. I only invite friends to my house, and if I call myself a house bank, I talk about an intimacy that I have with my clients that I hopefully will give them not only what they ask, but what they need, and that is a part of branding that I can enforce with brand activities, with marketing activities, and suddenly we move away from a price comparison to something that is a mixture of capabilities.”

Financial service companies need to prioritize the importance of brands, which goes beyond just a nice campaign with warm and fuzzy words. It is the distillation of their identity, reinforced by actual delivery. This shift moves away from price comparison toward a mix of capabilities and the intimacy that they build with clients. Ultimately, Woermann believes it is crucial for financial service companies to focus on branding and marketing to strengthen their identity and client relationships.

Creating the flow machine

Christoph explained about the project he's most proud of: Nine years ago, when he looked at his marketing team and delivery, he noticed that many articles and communication pieces were purchased from external media providers. A journalist would interview a banker, produce an article, which Christoph then had to rewrite because of the journalist's lack of knowledge. The finalized article would be marked as an advertorial, costing a lot of money and raising client skepticism.

Christoph decided to change this approach by creating an in-house publishing team. He hired journalists from top publications and began producing content internally. These journalists were not hired to praise Deutsche Bank but to interview product experts, other market participants, and even other banks. The aim was to create articles as a gift of knowledge for customers, valuing their time and avoiding constant product pushes.

The content created needed a distribution channel, so Christoph established a physical magazine as a content anchor.

“I wanted a magazine as a physical embodiment of the thoughts and the content and the knowledge that we impart with people. However, it should be a reference tool, but it's also a brand carrier because if you have a magazine that has 90 pages of content that we have created in a way that it's lasting more than a month, then it's a reference guide for one year that I can hand out at conferences and give sort of a taste of what you then can get weekly as a digital newsletter.”

The content strategy, named "flow" to reflect Deutsche Bank's role in the flow of goods and information, took time to gain internal trust. Over seven years, it grew in popularity, with regular requests to be featured in "flow" articles and videos. This shift from megaphone marketing to magnet marketing aimed to attract people through valuable content.

Christoph's proudest moment was building this content machine, which emphasized the importance of high-quality, relevant content, even in an era of AI-generated articles. Deutsche Bank also created the "Deutsche Bank flow" app, sharing content without ads and fostering financial literacy and dialogue. This app allowed users to access videos, podcasts, and other content on the go.

One unique feature of the app is "Expedition Finance," led by a former Deutsche Bank trader turned financial trend explorer, Jürgen Schmidt. He produces videos and interviews about innovative companies and trends, showcasing the bank's commitment to authenticity and sharing knowledge. This project embodies Christoph's belief in the power of content and the importance of a diverse team reflecting society.

People passion

Christoph shared his thoughts on self-reflection and the importance of understanding personal motivations. Regardless of one's industry or role, he encourages everyone to consider their origins and what truly drives them. He expressed a genuine love for people and a deep interest in discovering what motivates them, often engaging in conversations at parties, events, and conferences to learn about others' stories.

He emphasized the value of these stories in cross-relating to his day-to-day work. For example, Christoph's interest in social media began when he met the founder of Germany's Open Business Club (later Xing) in 2000. This encounter sparked his curiosity about LinkedIn as an emerging channel. He saw the potential of LinkedIn not for pushing messages but for engagement, leading to the natural growth of their social media presence just before lockdown.

Christoph advised against using corporate channels as mere extensions of press release machines. Instead, he advocated for curating content carefully, avoiding random award advertisements, and always providing added value. This approach drives his creativity and love for dialogue in various forms, such as reading or listening to podcasts.

He shared an example from a card shop near his office, where a poster read, "Don't grow up. It's a trap." Christoph reflected on this, questioning whether we should view childhood and adulthood as separate worlds.

“Isn't it more that you always hopefully combine the curiosity of a child, this nonjudgmental being happy about even small things, with the wisdom and the experience of an adult? This journey is a journey of constant growth and we can only grow by interacting.”