AMP's facelift

AMP’s latest advertisement, featuring its new-look logo, features a call to action to Australians to ‘own tomorrow today’.

In truth, it’s a pretty ad with a nice soundtrack, and is not too dissimilar from the ad campaign launched by the financial services firm last year, with a heavy focus on the history and strength of the AMP brand and the concept of taking control of our future.

If you haven’t already seen it, you can watch it below:

But whether it has the allure of an aspirational brand like Apple or Nike – and indeed whether any brand in financial services has the ability to achieve this – is debatable.

If brand value is derived when a customer is willing to pay a premium for a product or service, then the financial advice industry faces an uphill battle, with cost one of the biggest perceived barriers to using a financial adviser.

And if the Future of Financial Advice (FoFA) reforms put upwards pressure on advice fees as is widely anticipated, it may be difficult to convince consumers to pay for advice at all – let alone pay a premium for one brand over another.

The other way in which brand value is derived is when the buyer experiences a positive emotion from choosing a particular brand.

There are many examples of this in the car and consumer goods industries – for Apple’s customers, having an iphone is as much about belonging to the ‘in crowd’ as it is about having a high tech gadget – but few, if any, in the financial services sector.

While private banking is intended to make customers feel like they are receiving service levels that are a cut above the rest, it is hardly a relationship that can be worn on one’s sleeve like a VIP card flashed at a bar.

The new AMP ‘spark’ represents the first logo change for AMP since 1988 and follows the merger with AXA Asia Pacific’s Australian and New Zealand businesses.

Meanwhile, internally AMP and AXA are leveraging off the NAB’s ‘break up’ campaign with marketing boards inside the Melbourne head office advising staff that ‘while the banks have been busy breaking up, we’ve been getting together’.

We’re yet to see whether this is a match made in heaven…