Messages that matter
Ria Money Transfers
Background
People around the world use Ria Money Transfer to send money to their relatives, businesses, and schools — no matter where they are. While Ria is most well known as a remittance service, however, their key offering has evolved and expanded over the years to support even more financial services and tools for their customers.
This shift necessitated a new consideration of Ria’s value proposition, key brand messaging, and a new tagline in order to better reflect the broadened scope of their product offering
Ask & Challenge
A key challenge facing the Ria brand team was the balance of logic and emotion. Many customers choose which company they send money with for entirely logical reasons: who has the lowest rate?
But the reasons people send money are almost always very emotional. Whether it’s supporting a distant relative, building a dream home, paying for a child’s university: sending money is often fraught with emotional ties.
We needed to develop a value proposition that could capture this balance that they bring to their customers, a value that was both practical and emotional.
Approach
We began by looking at the five consumer relevancy factors: Price, Product, Access, Experience, and Service. Many companies fall into the trap of trying to be everything, to promise each element. But the reality is no company can excel in each one: to really succeed we needed to define what and where our focus could be.
We then ran a workshop with the Ria team, gathering product, service, retail, and marketing experts from Europe and North America together to define the value proposition and key message themes. We began by taking all of Ria’s key proof points and categorising them within the five consumer relevancy factors. The Ria team then went through each and prioritised which they felt was strongest, with the most salient and relevant proof points.
From this we were able to determine which of the consumer relevancy factors we could narrow in and focus on. This helped us to prioritise our messaging by understanding realistically what value we were bringing to Ria customers in a way that was relevant to their lives.
Over the course of the workshop we landed on a rough outline of a new value proposition for Ria, as well as key messaging themes that could take us through to testing. We then fine tuned the value proposition and used it to develop key messages and different tagline options in English and in Spanish. The messages corresponded not only to the value proposition, but to each of the key elements of consumer relevancy factors we had prioritised in the workshop. Both the messaging and the tagline then had variations that dialled up or down the emotional factorin order to determine what resonated most with consumers in our testing.
We developed and ran qualitative and quantitative testing in Spain and the U.S, with English and Spanish speakers. These surveys and qualitative interviews helped give us a very clear understanding of how emotion could resonate with customers.
Results
The results of our testing were clear, in both English and Spanish. We were able to focus messaging on three of the consumer relevancy factors, as well as pick the primary messages and proof points that could set the Ria brand up for success.
Results from the tagline survey were also strongly conclusive, with the tagline “Money Where You Need It” coming out on top as the balance of emotional and rational.
The new messaging framework used the key messages we’d tested as the starting point to be applied for messages across the customer journey. By balancing the emotional with the rational in the messaging, and ensuring we stayed relevant to our customers, we could make messaging just as effective as Ria’s services.
Services
Workshop development and facilitation
Brand messaging framework
Tagline development
Quantitative research direction
Qualitative research direction