Business
Hello and welcome to the bottom-up skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons the CEO of Qualitance and we are coming to the fourth installment. Of our Revolut series here on the bottom-up skills podcast. And it is all about the brand Revolut. It's about how they promote and what is happening exactly in 2021.So what's really fascinating is rivulets. Success in marketing really begins with the product itself. So together we're going to break that down and then they do great stuff throughout the journey. And it's really, uh, an invitation to participate in the Revolut experience. That's what all the customers receive.It really does feel like a, uh, an invitation. So let's see what's next for the brand. And [00:01:00] let's see if they can conquer the good old us of a. So, as I said, it starts with product. When you think about marketing, when you think about this brand Revolut, it all begins in the product itself, and they have had this huge focus on transparency and speed.And that's why customers love it. They get the basics right now. It is very hard. To kind of market your way out of the bad product, but if you have a good product, you'll be amazed at the share-ability the advocacy and the referral that you can get and Revolut have worked that out. So they definitely have this, um, Science, which is straddling both product and marketing thinking.And what they do is every time you have an experience in app, they are using emails, real-time notifications and a whole assortment of [00:02:00] triggers to not only. Confirm what you've just done. So you know exactly your balance, the state of your transfer, but they're also triggering you to come back into the experience.I mean, sometimes they're even offering you like, uh, games to play. I mean, whatever it takes, they're getting you in out and back into the product regularly and beyond just the digital app. When you go to the card. Particularly the metal card. It's beautiful. But when you go, even beyond that, the unboxing moment in the analog world is even a shareable moment too.And I think this is the first cluster of ideas, great product. They've got some really good behavioral loops inside of the product and anything that is adjacent to the core digital product. They've really thought about cards, the packaging as being shareable moments. [00:03:00] And I would only challenge you to go, go back in life 10 years ago, and then, and still for many, the receipt of banking cards is a non event.And Revolut simply challenged this idea and said, let's make it a shareable moment too, because it comes with status and delight and all those good things. What do we do? We get on the old Instagram, get on the Facebook, we share it. And that of course starts the marketing process. Now there's another thing that they've done brilliantly, which is they've created a lot of shared features in the product.Think there volts split the bill, some of the travel experiences. These are. By default shared experiences. So what happens is you are not only inviting your friends that have the product into the Revolut experience, then naturally you're inviting those that are not customers to come. And [00:04:00] eventually they become customers too.So once you're in and this is this big, um, sort of. Community experience that they drive for is they really involve the customer in many ways that traditional banks would not have even thought of. For example, you can participate in the naming of a feature. You can actually go to their offices and go to one of these things.They call a rev rally. You can hear what they're doing. You can actually meet the people behind the company. Now, when was the last time you saw a traditional legacy bank behaving like that? Even better, they actually published their roadmap. So it's quite agile. So they've got like their, their agile roadmap and it's a Trello board.You can go and view it, comment on it and make suggestions. And throughout your journey as a customer, you can participate in what they call their rev academy. So they are [00:05:00] delighting their customers, entertaining their customers. They're educating their customers. They're saying, come on, help us build this together.And that's all off the back of a, of a great product. That's ruthlessly quick and transparent. They do this on the back of their great, a metal card on the back of their great packaging. So you can start to see how things compound and we'll talk in a little bit about, um, the kind of network effects that they enjoy.The other interesting thing is the really recent news just in April. Is it, they launched a particular, uh, metal card with Anthony Joshua famous, uh, world champion heavyweight boxer. So this is a real step into big boy marketing. This is what you'd expect from global brands. This is what you would expect, maybe from some larger traditional banks.So we'll return to that later in the show, but I want to get to this last. [00:06:00] Notion of how they do their marketing. They are definitely marketing throughout the funnel, because if you think of the top of the funnel is awareness at the bottom of the funnel is referral. And all of those steps in between, they are really optimizing conversion and particularly spending very few paid media dollars to get the job done.That's what you can do when you have a great product. That's what you can do when your product by design puts the marketing inside. So customers go get more customers for you. So, if you look at one of their successful, um, starts, they actually said in the UK that they spent zero paid media dollars to get their first 1.5 million customers.I mean, this has got to have anyone in the marketing world drooling and it's because they invite you into the product. And it's because that product is in fact great. That gives them the permission to do this. Now, if you were to use some more formal thinking around this, this [00:07:00] is what we call their viral coefficient.This means how many customers does your existing customer recruit on your behalf? Now, many customers, um, Would think, man, I won't do this, but what Revolut does is it incentivizes you? So if you want to get a metal card, you can actually get a year for free. If you get five of your friends to sign up, it's a great example of how they incentivize that.So if you look right now from 2017 to today, we're looking at a company that has generated 15 million customers. And that's a lot. And if you think about how little they pay for paid media, in fact, they've definitely had some times where growth hasn't been that quick. Like if you look from 2017 through to 2019, it's not particularly quick, but after a little bit of a plateau in 2019, things really took [00:08:00] off, then COVID hit and they had a few flat months, but actually this is really interesting.As per sort of mid to late, uh, 20, 20 things got going and actually coming into 2021, here we are in May, 2021. And their growth is accelerating too. I think it might be the fastest growth they've ever experienced. Naturally big part of that is the fact that they are expanding globally, but this is, um, But they commonly refer to as their viral loops.This is how they do it. I use all of these, uh, tactics that I mentioned from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel and it compounds. And I think you're going to find that net net, this could be a global company that can say their viral coefficient is one for one, every customer, they win brings a [00:09:00] new customer.What a fascinating. Study what I mean so much to learn from this approach. Remember it starts with product, but however, there's still work to do, um, this Anthony Joshua Revolut X card, uh, they launched that, uh, well over a month ago now. And you know, I'm looking here at the YouTube channel, it's got 14,000 views, their formal announcement clip.That same clip has 5,000 views on Instagram. So. I'm thinking those numbers don't look so crash hot and I'm not seeing much conversation about it. So it tells you getting into some of this traditional branding, um, influencer celebrity partnership. Doesn't look like the biggest success for them. So, Hey, look, work to do, but when you've got a great product and you've got marketing baked in, you can afford some time to learn how to get your branding, [00:10:00] right.So Dave, you've got it. We've broken down the very heart of how Revolut has built a brand, how they are building and marketing a global financial services, super app. That's what they're all about. It starts with that great product. Then inviting the customer to participate the entire journey through, and then you can get some pretty amazing viral coefficients going.Now, if you want to learn how to build a great product is one place. You can go bottom-up dot AI, and there you're going to learn everything. You need to build a great product to build a great credit team, to learn about design thinking and agile, all of those things. Bottom-up dot IO. And there you'll find.Every think you could dream of all right. That's it for the bottom-up skills podcast. That's a wrap. [00:11:00]