Why Brand Building is the most underrated growth strategy in Financial Services

There’s a persistent belief in financial services that marketing is a cost centre dressed up as a business function, that the real levers of growth are rate tables, product features, and distribution. That advertising, in particular, is something you do when the board wants to feel good about the company.

Nationwide Building Society has spent the last two years making a fairly compelling argument to the contrary.

From liked to chosen

Before the rebrand, Nationwide wasn’t struggling with its image. It was well-regarded, trusted, and broadly liked. The problem was that none of that was translating into action. Internally, the brand team described it as “passive positivity” — people thought well of Nationwide in the way they think well of a neighbour they never actually invite round for dinner.

In October 2023, the building society launched its biggest rebrand in nearly 40 years. Out went the familiar village icon, in came a new brand platform: A Good Way to Bank. The creative, developed by New Commercial Arts, centred on Dominic West playing an exquisitely awful bank CEO the kind of man who can’t finish a sentence without revealing his indifference to the people his institution is supposed to serve. His fictional employer, A.N.Y. Bank, wasn’t a subtle metaphor.

The campaign worked on two levels simultaneously. For existing members, it validated the choice they’d already made. For everyone else, it planted a clear question: why are you still banking somewhere that treats you like this?

The numbers that matter

Campaign recall data from Kantar’s The Works study put the “In Your Best Interest” ad — part of the same Good Way to Bank platform — in the top 8% of all UK ads. Almost one in two people who saw it reported having noticed another element of the campaign separately, suggesting it was building genuine mental availability rather than just landing a single impression. Over half of respondents (53%) said they couldn’t fail to remember it was a Nationwide ad. In a category where most advertising is forgotten within minutes of exposure, that’s a meaningful result.

Ad effectiveness firm System1 rated the relaunch ad in the top 10% of consumer banking ads it had ever tested. Its short-term brand uplift score (the “spike rating”) came in at 1.44, System1 classified it as exceptional. The emotional intensity score was 1.34, against a category average of 1.01. These aren’t soft metrics. They’re predictive of commercial performance.

Reach, then reinforce

The media strategy was built around scale and credibility. Nationwide invested heavily in news brands — full-page spreads, inside-front-cover double-page spreads, fireplace placements — to carry the weight of the message. This wasn’t just a TV campaign with a bit of press support. It was a deliberate decision to be seen in contexts that lend authority to the claim being made. Banks don’t usually advertise their branch promises across the front of national newspapers. The placement itself reinforced the point.

The result: Nationwide’s share of voice in financial services advertising rose to first place among its peers during the campaign period. YouGov’s Brand Index — a composite measure of impression, quality, value, reputation and likelihood to recommend — increased significantly between April 2023 and July 2024. Advertising awareness and buzz scores rose sharply when the campaign was relaunched in November 2023. Newsworks named Nationwide its Advertiser of the Year for 2024.

The commercial case

Here’s where it gets interesting for anyone who still thinks brand building and commercial performance are separate conversations.

In 2013, Nationwide held roughly 6.2% of the UK current account market. By 2024, that figure had climbed to approaching 11%. That’s not a short campaign effect, it’s a decade of consistent investment in differentiation compounding into market share. The building society is now the overall biggest winner across all 11 years of the Current Account Switch Service’s seven-day switching data, out of 54 participating banks and building societies.

The most dramatic single data point comes from Q4 2023, which was the same quarter the rebrand launched. Nationwide recorded net current account switching gains of 163,363. The second-placed Barclays managed 12,823. Nationwide wasn’t narrowly ahead. It attracted more than 10 times as many net switchers as its nearest rival. You could reasonably argue that it was partly driven by the £200 cash switching offer running at the same time, and you’d be right. But the switching offer alone doesn’t account for the scale of the gap, nor does it explain what happened next. In Q3 2024, with no major cash incentive on offer, Nationwide still led all switching gains at 22,622, ahead of Barclays, TSB and Lloyds. The big losers in that same quarter were Santander, NatWest and Halifax.

Customer satisfaction tells a similar story. Nationwide has led its peer group in satisfaction for 14 consecutive years. Its lead over competitors widened from 3.8 percentage points in March 2023 to 5.5 points in March 2024, and further to 7.5 points by March 2025. That’s not a brand that’s standing still.

The mutual advantage and how they’ve used it

Part of what makes Nationwide’s strategy interesting is that it’s built around something genuinely different rather than a positioning invented for marketing purposes. As a building society with no shareholders, it can direct profits back to members. Other banks can claim to put customers first; Nationwide can actually demonstrate it.

The Fairer Share payment launched in 2023, hands eligible members £100 directly from profits. In 2024, that meant £385 million distributed to 3.85 million customers. The year before, it was £340 million to 3.4 million. In 2025, the payment went out for a third consecutive year. Alongside it, Nationwide offered a member-exclusive savings bond at 5.5% — well above the next best available rate at the time — and a £200 switching incentive for existing savings or mortgage customers.

Then, in early 2025, off the back of the Virgin Money acquisition, came the Big Nationwide Thank You: £50 to over 12 million eligible members. Over £600 million distributed, framed as recognition of the role members played in building the financial strength that made the deal possible. Whether or not you buy the framing entirely, the mechanics are hard to argue with. Nationwide returned more than £3.5 billion in member value between April 2023 and early 2025.

The point is that these aren’t separate things. The advertising, the branch promise, the profit-sharing, the switching offer they all reinforce the same claim. 

That’s how brand building actually works in practice. Not one campaign, but a consistent set of actions that accumulate into a position that competitors find genuinely difficult to replicate. NatWest can match a cash switching incentive. It can’t become a mutual.

What this means for financial services more broadly

The industry has a habit of treating marketing as the department that makes things look nice and writes the copy for the annual report. Nationwide’s last two years are a case study in what happens when marketing is treated as a growth function with a clear strategic position, consistent investment, and creative brave enough to actually be remembered.

The Dominic West ads attracted 281 complaints to the ASA. One of those complainants was Santander, who challenged the branch closure claims and ultimately got the original ad banned. You could see that as a setback. Or you could note that the controversy generated significant earned media coverage, that the campaign was revised and continued, and that Nationwide ended up using the ASA ruling as an opportunity to announce an extended Branch Promise through to 2028. The brand came out of the episode in a stronger position than it entered.

Financial services isn’t a category where people spend much time thinking about their provider. Most customers choose a bank, have a reasonably adequate experience, and never think much about it again. That’s precisely why consistent, memorable, emotionally resonant advertising matters, it shapes the consideration set long before anyone actively starts looking. By the time a customer has reason to switch, Nationwide has already been in their head for months.

The market share gains didn’t happen because of one good quarter or one clever campaign. They happened because the brand said something coherent, said it consistently, backed it up with actual product and commercial decisions, and kept going. That’s not magic. It’s just good marketing, done properly, over time.

Sources: CASS switching data (Pay.UK) · Nationwide annual results 2023–25 · System1 ad effectiveness data via Marketing Week · Kantar The Works study via Marketing Week · YouGov BrandIndex via Newsworks · Newsworks Advertiser of the Year case study · Nationwide Fairer Share · The Big Nationwide Thank You · ASA ruling via Marketing Week