Ron-Rogowski [Posted by Ron Rogowski]

I wanted to alert our readers to a new series of research recently published on our Web site, called “Best And Worst Of Financial Services Brand Building Web Sites, 2009.”

For this project, we used Forrester’s Web Site Brand Review methodology to evaluate 16 sites in total, 4 each in 4 financial services industries: banking, credit cards, insurance, and investments. (We chose the sites based on performance in our annual Customer Experience Index rankings. There were a few minor exceptions we had to handle because of industry overlap. The full rationale for how we chose the sites to evaluate is listed in the report.)

Forrester’s Web Site Brand Review methodology grades sites on how well they cater to customer needs (Brand Action) while also measuring how well sites reinforce brand image (Brand Image). Here’s how the sites fared on those two dimensions:

Best and worst graphic

The big takeaway from the research is that while no site is perfect, a handful of sites do differentiated brand experience by providing useful, usable sites that send messages consistent with their brands.

 

In addition to the main document, there are also industry deep dives for banks, credit card providers, insurers, and investment firms. These documents offer more detail on how each company fared in context of others in their industry.

As always, we welcome your comments and observations.