Unlock Growth: Winning Strategies for Banks Beyond Blending In

In a banking landscape often characterized by uniformity, Eric Fulwiler, CEO and co-founder of Rival and former CMO of 11:FS, reveals how challenger brands achieve remarkable growth. His extensive research, conducted in partnership with Imperial College London, led to the Rival 50 benchmark – an index identifying brands that gain significant momentum through clear differentiation, strong relevance, and high talkability.

Fulwiler asserts that the primary hurdle for traditional banks isn’t a lack of technological capability, but rather a build-up of “marketing debt” and a reluctance to make bold strategic decisions. Challenger brands thrive by subverting industry norms, deeply integrating with specific microcultures, and operating with the mindset of media companies focused on capturing attention.

For retail banking leaders, the path forward is clear: refine differentiation, elevate marketing to a core business driver, embed structured innovation into operations, and redefine the CMO role around measurable commercial impact.

Key Strategies for Banking Leaders:

• Challenge Conventions: Integrate a third strategic lens into brand planning: what established category convention are you intentionally disrupting?
• Activate Microcultures: Focus on engaging interest-based communities that align with your ideal customer profile, rather than broad demographic segments. Authentic relevance within these groups fuels growth.
• Adopt a Media Company Mindset: Design campaigns for “talkability”—how 1,000 people share your message with 10 others—not just for broad reach.
• Leverage AI for Connection: AI can streamline seamless customer experiences, freeing staff to focus on high-value relationship building. Efficiency, therefore, becomes a catalyst for deeper human connection.
• Win Everyday Financial Behaviors: In 2026, primacy belongs to institutions that excel in daily financial interactions and build trust for significant life decisions. The aim is dominance in critical moments, not perpetual ownership.

Fulwiler’s core premise is simple: challengers succeed not by outspending, but by making sharper, more deliberate choices.

Quantifying Brand Momentum: The Rival 50 Index

The Rival 50 index emerged from a rigorous four-month research initiative, moving beyond subjective “top brands” lists. In collaboration with Imperial College London, Fulwiler’s team quantified brand momentum by measuring:

• Revenue growth (where data was available)
• Share of search – a crucial leading indicator strongly linked to commercial performance
• Brand performance across three key drivers: differentiation, relevance, and talkability

This annual benchmark highlights brands that achieve disproportionate impact with limited resources. It underscores that growth signals can be identified much earlier than through traditional financial metrics. Relying solely on lagging indicators means reacting to events long after they’ve occurred.

Differentiation Through Decisive Choices

A common pitfall in financial services marketing, according to Fulwiler, is a brand strategy that addresses audience needs and product value but fails to challenge category norms. Challenger brands, conversely, ask: “What convention are we intentionally breaking?”

Many regional bank campaigns are generic; remove the logo, and the ad could belong to any competitor. This is a strategic, not just a creative, problem.

Fulwiler provides two practical prompts for clients:

• If your logo vanished, would your marketing still be uniquely identifiable?
• Is there a specific customer group who would openly state, “That brand isn’t for me”?

This second question can be uncomfortable for banks accustomed to broad targeting. Yet, challenger brands view strategic exclusion as a form of focus, clearly defining who they serve and, by extension, who they don’t. For retail banks, this translates to sharper positioning, perhaps specializing in small business solutions, creator economy banking, or highly localized community niches. Products, messaging, and experiences must then align with this distinct stance. Without differentiation, price and distribution become the only remaining competitive levers.

Finding Relevance in Microcultures

Fulwiler’s research indicates that culturally relevant brands grow approximately six times faster than category averages. Challenger brands seek out microcultures—interest-based communities formed around shared passions, rather than demographics—that are highly concentrated within their target audiences. They then craft tailored activations that often garner outsized attention because competitors are absent from these spaces.

For banks, this necessitates a re-evaluation of segmentation. Instead of broad categories like “Millennials” or “affluent households,” consider more specific microcultures such as:

• Independent fitness entrepreneurs
• E-sports enthusiasts
• Advocates for sustainable living
• Local real estate investors

This strategy is effective because relevance compounds. When a brand authentically engages a community, a sense of belonging follows, which, in turn, drives advocacy. Fulwiler emphasizes that marketing should act as a two-way bridge, not only bringing products to market but also integrating customer culture into product development. When microculture insights shape features, partnerships, and messaging, differentiation organically strengthens.

Transforming Marketing into a Media Engine

Challenger brands, often with limited budgets, are compelled to think like media companies. They cannot rely on brute-force paid reach, instead optimizing for “talkability.” Rather than asking, “How do we reach 10,000 people?” they inquire, “If 1,000 people see this, how do we inspire each of them to tell 10 others?”

The significance: Financial institutions frequently communicate updates sporadically and transactionally. Instead, they should continuously narrate product evolution, reinforcing momentum much like consumer brands do.

Thinking like a media company involves:

• Designing ongoing content streams, not episodic campaigns.
• Building recurring audience touchpoints.
• Measuring earned amplification, beyond mere impressions.
• Treating attention as a scarce resource to be captured and retained.

As generative AI simplifies content production, generic content will proliferate while human attention remains finite. Fulwiler forecasts that meaningful in-person experiences and experiential marketing will become increasingly valuable amidst digital noise. Banks that master sustained storytelling and community engagement will outperform those that view marketing as infrequent announcements.

Marketing’s Role in Enterprise Alignment

One of Fulwiler’s most profound insights is organizational, not purely tactical. Marketing cannot thrive if product and operations teams operate in silos. Customers experience a unified brand; they don’t separate marketing from onboarding, underwriting, or customer service.

Through over 200 CMO interviews, Fulwiler identified a consistent pattern: high-performing CMOs actively engage with customers and ensure their teams do the same. They act as translators between market demands and internal decision-making.

He outlines three imperatives for the modern CMO:

1. Think like a board member: Directly link marketing efforts to overarching enterprise growth.
2. Own measurable business outcomes: Marketing exists to drive concrete results, not just vanity metrics.
3. Leverage data and technology strategically: Transform marketing technology and analytics into core strategic assets.

For leaders struggling with incrementalism, Fulwiler suggests structured innovation frameworks—such as 70/20/10 allocation models or internal “1% vs. 10x” investment splits—to prevent organizations from defaulting to minor optimizations. True innovation rarely happens by accident; it requires intentional space and investment.

The Ultimate Goal: Disrupt Your Own Model

Perhaps Fulwiler’s most challenging advice, inspired by institutions like DBS Bank, is that leadership must proactively attempt to disrupt its own model before competitors do. For banks, critical questions to ponder include:

• If a fintech launched today with no legacy systems, what would it do differently?
• What marketing debt has accumulated over the past decade?
• Which internal assumptions remain unchallenged?

Incumbent banks possess invaluable trust—an asset challenger brands struggle to earn. However, trust alone does not guarantee future growth. The banks that will truly thrive are those that combine this inherent trust with sharper positioning, relevance within microcultures, media fluency, and structured innovation. These capabilities do not necessitate abandoning compliance or stability; they require clearer choices and disciplined execution. In an industry where many brands blend in, this distinct approach can create a powerful competitive advantage.

Source: Thefinancialbrand.com