“It’s Important For Marketers To Demand A Seat At The Table”: HSBC’s Stephanie Ng

Since joining HSBC in 2022, Stephanie Ng has spearheaded the bank’s recent Quality of Life campaign, focusing on the crucial ‘mass affluent’ customer base. The marketing veteran, who has spent most of her 20-year career in financial services (including a stint as a “real banker”), leveraged insights from an 11,000 strong survey of customers across 11 markets, reflecting a more data-driven approach compared to typical product-focused messaging.

The next Quality of Life report will roll out in the coming weeks. Ahead of that, Ng sat down with PRovoke Media to discuss lessons and learnings from the campaign, and from her career in marketing, digital and technology. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Arun Sudhaman [AS]: Can you share the inspiration behind the Quality of Life campaign?

Stephanie Ng [SN]: Quality of Life is something that we launched last year for the very first time and we’re repeating it going forward on an annual basis. I felt that it was really important that we created a platform which we use to communicate the findings of research that spans 11 markets, talking really about the correlation between financial fitness to mental as well as physical wellness. It’s a platform where we are able to share with our customers the insights that we’re seeing locally and globally, and also understanding areas where the bank is able to come in to support our customers across the journey from wealth creation to wealth management to wealth protection and legacy planning. If you look at the space today, there isn’t really an area where we talk about connecting all these three — financial wellness, mental wellness and physical well-being today in the market. 

What were some of the most surprising insights you discovered from the survey, and how did they shape the campaign’s direction?

SN: What we’re seeing is that most of our customers today, when they look at financial planning, they are only very much focusing on healthcare protection. So they’re not focusing as much on the other pillars of financial planning — for example, retirement, wealth accumulation and, particularly, legacy planning is not something that is super top of mind compared to healthcare protection. I really want to dial up also on legacy planning — every time we talk about legacy planning, we always associate it to private banking, very high affluent individual segments, but it’s not really the case. Even emerging and mass affluent individuals believe that it’s relevant for them. Even so, we see that only four in ten have written a will.   

What were some of the major challenges your team faced during the development of the Quality of Life campaign, and how did you overcome them?

SN: So, HSBC is a very big organization. I believe that it’s arguably the only global bank left at the moment. So, as you can imagine, there are a lot of stakeholders that we need to navigate as well. Given the fact that [this campaign] was ideated out of the global central team, I also did not want it to be just something that was developed at the center and with no collaboration with the markets. This is going to be something that we will partner with the markets from the outset. That was very important to ensure that we had that stakeholder buy in, and we also got feedback as to what the markets would like to see in the report. 

The other challenge is, how do we ensure that we have a very consistent, concentrated and well planned execution, global as well as local markets? I’m very, very pleased with how it was activated, given the complexity of this entire initiative. There were local nuances that we catered for. One thing it will be surprising to know also, is that we did not spend a lot on paid media. This was 100% local, earned and owned media leveraging on our existing channels. We activated top leaders, wealth experts within the bank where there was also social engagement that they did across social media to talk about Quality of Life.

We also used the insights from the Quality of Life [research] in everything that we do. For example, the insights showed us that 50% of our customers today would want to send their child abroad to study. But that eats into their retirement savings, around 20% to 60% of the retirement savings just to fund international education. These are very important insights, and how, obviously, the bank is able to support them. Not just in the wealth space, but also in how we are able to finance the child’s education abroad. We are able to integrate different aspects of the research findings into everything that we do. Plus we also activated our sales, our relationship managers who use these insights to have conversation starters with their clients as well. It was a really interesting, classic way of harnessing the power of thought leadership and content marketing. We didn’t put so much money into paid media, but really we got a lot of coverage from this entire initiative, which is why we want to do it again this year and obviously the years beyond. 

How did you measure the success of this initiative? Are there any kind of particular metrics or achievements you can share? 

I think overall we look at the PR engagement, the media value, across the 11 markets was just phenomenal. I don’t want to put a number to it, but it’s in the millions in terms of the media value we’ve gotten. Because this topic is so interesting, so topical, people want to know what are the key insights and how it relates to financial as well as physical and mental. Therefore, there was a lot of coverage. In fact, even in Vietnam, where we did not launch this study, the Vietnamese press talked about it — there is a demand for such content, such insights. In future we’ll look at expanding into markets that are not within the existing coverage.

Obviously, we also looked at things like lead generation content downloads because the Quality of Life report is on our website. We also measured the engagement of people landing on our website, downloading the report, engaging with the report. That gives us another view as to how that is performing. Also, of course, on our own social media, we had engagement that was really two times above our average benchmarks on our LinkedIn channels. We also had the highest organic visits, again, two times more people visiting that webpage as well, even on earned media. Within the first month of launch, we had more than 200 articles that were published around Quality of Life.  

The campaign appears to have struck a chord with the audiences you were hoping to reach. You just mentioned customer feedback. Did that influence any particular adjustments to the campaign or will it do in the future? 

Actually, it has. When we publish the Quality of Life report, we’ve gotten a lot of feedback that they also want to understand investor behaviour insights, which is almost like a subset of what they would like to see out of Quality of Life. There is clear interest around that. And then we look at this space and we say, in the private bank, high net worth space, there are a lot of top leadership and white papers around investor insights, but they’re very skewed towards the private bank. How can we do this for mass and upper affluent individuals? We then launched an affluent investor snapshot just two months ago. 

And again, that’s obviously shared with our relationship managers, with their clients as well. Also, are there other channels in which we can reach our audiences? Because we do know that the wealth management space can be very complex. We try to see how we’re able to make it more bite-sized, easy to consume, type of content. People are intrigued and then they start asking questions. Ultimately, I think what we want to do here is lead the space in wealth management. So I think it’s important that, given the breadth and the depth of expertise that I’m seeing within the bank, we have this platform in which all our thought leaders, our experts, are able to reach consumers in a very simple, considered and consistent and engaging manner. I think we’re obviously going to be looking at new approaches to how we want to reach our audiences. 

What advice would you give to other marketing leaders looking to adopt a similar approach in their campaigns?

I’ve been in a bank for a very long time now, not just in HSBC, but in the industry. Number one is that we must always understand our customers, which means understanding their pain points, their preferences, their behaviours and also their decision-making processes. Then I think from there, as a marketer, we then obviously try to build specific customer personas so that we are able to design our marketing campaigns, delivering a seamless, personalized experience to our customers across every touchpoint to really enhance the whole customer journey. 

I will also say that, usually, marketing is always at the end of the product creation process. What I try to do and encourage my teams to do is that we should be part of the curation of the proposition from the get go. I do ask for a seat at the table, I just go. As you’re crafting the proposition, it’s so important that they take into account the customer lens as well. Having a marketer at the table influencing and challenging and asking the questions as the product or the proposition is being built is so critical because we understand how it ladders up to the bigger picture.

I’m not a believer in a top down approach because it only gets you this much impact and reach to our customers. But if you partner very closely with the markets, it’s activated. It’s all integrated with PR, comms, marketing. You get so much mileage in terms of the reach to your customers. It’s not easy to convince so many stakeholders, but I think once they see the success and they realise they can take bits and pieces of Quality of Life into everything they do, then you start getting the traction, you get the support. Which is why we are able to very easily come up with an affluent investor report and also enhancing and expanding from nine to 11 markets this year. So I’m very pleased with what we have been able to do given the fact that this is our second year.  

What lessons have you learned during your two decades in marketing leadership roles? 


Interestingly, I started off as a marketer, then became a ‘real banker’. I was actually running credit cards and personal loans [for Standard Chartered], the P&L, for a couple of years. Then I kind of took a leap, because I was very curious, and joined Meta. I really wanted to hear and learn about how a big tech company operates. There was so much talk around digital, digital marketing, and content creation, influencers. I think for me it’s all about being curious and wanting to always learn more. Which is why I joined Meta and I learned all things digital. 

Coming back into the banking industry in this role gives me a bigger perspective because I understand how retail banking operates from a P&L perspective. But also I have the digital experience from content marketing to martech capabilities and commercialization, things like that. And being able to use that in the creation process as well as the entire development of the customer journey. It’s not just about paid media or putting up an app. It’s about how you help customers to get them interested. As they land on our digital shop front, what happens next? How easy, fast, how intuitive it is. It is a journey. That’s why I keep saying that it’s important for marketers to really demand a seat at the table from the very beginning so that you’re able to influence the entire customer creation process.