Lloyds rebrand no mere ‘CMO vanity project’ says marketing boss

Lloyds refreshed brand is the result of some major existential questioning about the future of its business. “How do we create a bank that is fit for the future? What would it take for us to create a modern, next-generation financial services business that will withstand the test of time?” are the questions Lloyds senior leaders have been asking, Balaji says.

Balaji was brought in as chief marketing officer a year ago to “reimagine” the Lloyds brand as part of a wider business transformation spearheaded by its group chief executive, Charlie Nunn, and Jayne Opperman, its chief executive officer for consumer relations.

With 20 million customers using the Lloyds app on a multitude of different digital platforms, the brand needs to be flexible enough to evolve over time to be ready for changes in mobile or to adapt to wearable tech or smaller pixels.

It is also crucial for Lloyds to get its customers using its digital products as it plans for more branch closures over the next two years. Across the Lloyds group, which includes Halifax and Bank of Scotland, 55 branches will have closed by the end of 2024, bringing the total number of planned closures to nearly 300 by 2026.

Good brand management is active brand management

Lloyds hired the agency Wolff Olins to review its brand architecture. The result is a new photography style and brightened color palette, with the creation of 500 new assets. Wolff Olins also helped to tweak Lloyds’ tone of voice, which the bank defines as “a grounded sense of Britishness” and developed a new brand positioning: ‘Lloyds Moves Everyone Forward.’

“We needed to take a traditional brand and make it timeless. We don’t want people to think this is my dad’s bank versus this is my bank,” he says. Balaji adds that this work was only possible because Lloyds was willing to be flexible with its brand. “Part of good brand management is active brand management.”

Balaji oversees the brand marketing team and the experience team, bringing together advertising with design, UX and UI, all under one umbrella. It’s a rare department structure, he claims, yet one that is a “huge” competitive advantage.

“We all know that brand management is not advertising-led anymore. Every touch point counts; your brand is the sum total of all experiences. You go from a search link all the way through to product to downloading an app, all the way to using the app in the same journey – and it all needs to be seamless and connected.”

Rebranding a bank is no mean feat. Lloyds has 40 different banking platforms and 16 different brands within the group. Its customer base spans all demographics and accessibility needs. Then throw in the fact that it’s a heavily regulated sector and deals in people’s most personal data.

To get this off the ground – and fast – Lloyds created a cross-function working group to ensure that everyone, from designers to corporate affairs, can make the new brand work for their needs. “This way, when we drop the campaign, it’s incredible; it just lands because we’ve created the conditions, everyone has participated in the whole app journey and then it’s on fire.”

The Lloyds Banking Group has 26 million users, which means Lloyds is now operating more like a tech company, Balaji says. This changes the way it rolls out rebrands since people are used to seeing their apps refreshed in the background. Lloyds has been releasing changes in cycles throughout the year rather than on one big launch day. “Old world brand management would have been building the kit, testing it all out, waiting for 18 months, crossing all the Ts, dotting all the Is and then letting it go out,” he says.

A Lloyds ad without the horse

To mark the completion of the rollout, Lloyds tasked the creative agency Adam&EveDDB with developing a launch campaign to run on AV, audio, outdoor, social, digital, influencer and gaming channels. The hero ad follows a dad on a day out with his daughter and the spending is really adding up, so the dad uses his Lloyds app to block his card.

This campaign is the first Lloyds commercial that doesn’t feature its iconic black horse running, which has been a thread throughout its advertising history. Balaji, a huge advocate for the power of the horse in Lloyds’ advertising (so much so he was wearing a T-shirt with it during our interview), says his job was to “codify” what the horse means rather than show it. “When you think about Lloyds adverts, when you think about the horses, the real magic is when the little girl touches the horse’s snout and the goosebumps. How do we codify that into our experiences? That is the biggest piece we’ve been working on,” he says.

The campaign has three KPIs. The priority is to get more customers using Lloyds digital products, the second KPI is purely to get more customers and the third is all about how much you can learn from the campaign. Learning and bringing insight back is such an important KPI, says Balaji. This campaign is also Lloyds’ first go at TikTok advertising, its first influencer plan and its first integrated multi-channel media buy.

In Balaji’s final summary of his year-long rebrand project, he says: “If you take the power of our brand, if you take the distribution, if you take the investment that’s going into the digital transformation, if you take our app and then you add this, the magic of the brand, as a key ingredient into it and then you set it on fire, it just becomes this amazing warm bonfire on which you can warm your hands.”

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