Insight & strategy what international means in light of cultural changes and the way the world is changing around us, even before Covid-19, says Josh Sorene, head of brand and reputation performance and insights at HSBC. Part of this was expanding our view of international beyond just physical movement of people. As a newly formed insight team, we want to bring disruptive thinking into the bank. This means challenging the status quo around what international really means. The findings confirmed many of the aspects of being an internationalist, and allowed the bank to understand their characteristics and role in society. One example, says Mitchinson, is their love of stability in an ever changing world, as well as a more outward-looking approach to the world around them. The world is now based on change, and having a moment of stability is a fantastic luxury to be savoured. They can pivot with change, but also embrace the stable moments around them, he says. Theres an appreciation that the individual focus for society is not the only way either. Sometimes it pays to be more collective, be it looking after your family or looking after the planet. Sometimes, we have to work together. The right path The work has helped change HSBCs approach to its brand, culminating in a restructure of the firms insights function. What was once a single insights department has been split into three, with one focused on consumer wealth, another on business to business and commercial, and a smaller, crossline business team led by Sorene that is sat within the banks brand and communications department. The restructure is part of a more radical overhaul of how HSBC treats the concept of brand. As a newly formed communication and brand function, this allows us to elevate the role of the brand, says Sorene. Brands should guide how organisations behave. As a brand insight team, we are focusing on bridging the gap between expectation and reality. We are deliberately decoupling brand from marketing, he adds. That is a strategic decision we are making to elevate and change what brand means, and trying to move brand away from being advertising and marcomms to being anything that changes and influences perceptions of HSBC. This piece of work has done a great job in unifying a persona that can work across the bank. There is often a focus on a commercial customer looks like this; a retail customer looks like this, while, ultimately, they are just people there is one brand; there is one human. The result is that, as of the end of 2021, marketing is no longer a function, but a discipline within the organisation. Marketing is no longer a function, but a discipline within the organisation There were two primary drivers behind this. One was that marketing would sit better within the lines of business. Marketing is now more of a short-term sales function within the business; brand has been decoupled from it and placed in the communications function, which has been renamed as communications and brand. The purpose of that is two-fold, says Sorene. One is that there was a feeling we were suppressing what we really meant by the brand by sitting it within marketing. When brand was in marketing, brand was logos, designs, font sizes and distinctive assets. While it is still those things, it is now far broader and, as a brand team, we are across anything that impacts on how people view the bank. He goes on to say: A lot of brand measures that exist in organisations are vanity measures things such as the number of likes and clicks and awareness. What does it translate into, and can we start to quantify better the commercial impact of some of the movements we see in the data, and demystify what brand means? For too many people, brand is some kind of wishy-washy advertising idea, and we are trying to change that. We also need to go beyond what consumers think of us to understand brand through the lens of employees and stakeholders. Over the horizon The restructure means that the global head of communications and brand, for 32 Impact ISSUE 38 2022_pp30-33 I&S HSBC.indd 32 22/06/2022 15:42