Brand & Verbal Strategy
With fintech challengers like Monzo and Starling reshaping expectations around digital convenience, first direct risked losing its once-disruptive edge. We helped reposition the brand around a deeper human need: financial wellbeing. Built on audience psychology, our strategy encouraged first direct to move beyond traditional banking propositions and lean into their real differentiator: their reputation for going above and beyond in customer care.
The strategy reframed financial wellbeing as a core value, linking emotional reassurance with practical banking benefits. This allowed first direct to deliver both rational and emotional value, and reassert their relevance in a crowded market. As Creative Director, I worked closely with our strategy team to shape the narrative and led the development of the brand’s Verbal Strategy, guiding our writers in creating a fresh, relevant voice for first direct.
A Verbal Strategy is a structured set of linguistic building blocks, scientifically engineered to work with a given psychology. A simplified way of thinking about it is as a language analogue to visual identity branding. Each element of the Strategy is carefully crafted to align to the psychological and motivational drivers of the target audience and applied to comms to effect the desired perception and behaviour change.
