Work
Helping a bank be relevant in a sustainable way
One of Ireland’s leading financial service providers was struggling to connect with young students at both secondary and tertiary levels and lacked understanding of their broad needs and their changing financial needs as they progressed through their education. The bank sought help from The Youth Lab for strategic direction on how to engage with 12-18-year-old school students and 17-25-year-old college students.
The Approach:
The Youth Lab undertook a two-phase insights and strategy project – first doing a deep-dive into the world of 17-25-year-olds enrolled at third level education (first year to postgrad) and later a deep-dive into the world of 12-18-year-olds still at school. After extensive internal stakeholder engagement, The Youth Lab connected with 90 students across Ireland, in groups and in one-to-one scenarios, both online and offline in universities, I.T. campuses and schools.
The Youth Lab also undertook an extensive exploration of the educational marketplace, engaging education and finance experts and mapped the activity of competitor brands against the needs of students, identifying a marketplace ‘gap’ and a corresponding positioning for the bank to transcend both second and third level segment audiences.
The Output:
The Youth Lab provided the bank with an in-depth understanding of school/college life, unearthing young students’ perspectives on success, work and money management
to generate game-changing insights, a core youth proposition and a series of brand actions that fed into multiple business areas - from sales to distribution, product development to branch engagement.
The Outcome:
The Youth Lab’s strategic direction, amplified via a series of in-house workshops, has been fundamental to the business’ current and future ability to be relevant to a youth audience and increase the lifetime value of its young customers. The work delivered a more effective and efficient approach to youth communication and has also delivered on enhancing the brand’s overall reputation, delivering positive sentiment transcending the youth audience. It also opened the bank up to new revenue streams via new product development, insight-led youth financial propositions for the coming 3-5 years, and the optimisation of current products without any requirement for major investment into technology.
“The depth and richness of The Youth Lab’s insight and strategic thinking will be key to informing our youth propositions for the coming years. We’ve partnered on multiple projects which have delivered tangible outcomes for us and our customers. I highly recommend them to anyone looking to engage with younger generations.”