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Wise is a pitch perfect challenger brand, making a villain out of the hidden fees banks charge on international transfers and rallying customers around a mission to capture 5% market share of a $22T industry

Anyone who’s ever gotten steamed about making money moves across bordersMission-driven foundersChallenger brand stansPeople longing for the return of the 2010 era flash mob

Hello!

Today’s brand is Wise, a founder-led, bankless currency exchange dedicated to eliminating the bloated fees charged by banks on international money transfers.

Shoutout to Troy and Ben who both suggested this brand! 🙏

Never had to transfer money internationally? Count yourself #blessed.

Wise’s founders, two Estonian blokes, weren’t down with the hidden fees incurred by banks and money transfer services and built a product that slashed the hidden fees in order to let people keep more of their money. But how do you fundamentally change a category for the better, while making people aware of a problem they don’t even know they have? Wise’s highlights reel includes:

Turns out, not ripping people off is good business!

Wise is a masterclass in building a customer centric culture, a 10x product and mission driven brand marketing: a cocktail for success, but not for the faint of heart!

Let’s follow the money 💰

Wise is bullish on what’s wrong with the world: hidden fees.

So bullish that they built a product that was 10X faster and cheaper than anything on the market.

Founder-led companies are legendary at making products that are category defining. Bain & Company research shows that disproportionately, founder led businesses are most successful at maintaining profitable growth over the long term.

Brands that successfully reimagine the way the world works most often start with an extraordinarily clear purpose. Unlike fonts, colors, or even CEOs, which all come and go, purpose is a powerful driver for behavior change from the inside out.

Wise’s written manifesto is a stellar example of clear purpose👇 But Wise didn’t even have their mission written down until 5 years in.

What they did was create an environment where a mission could take root: a customer centric environment.

And what Wise heard from customers in the early days? They didn’t even know there was a problem!

That gave Wise clear direction for their marketing. They needed to make people aware of the problem, reflect what customers actually care about while delivering a meaningfully better product. And that is the recipe for advocacy.

The simple, written manifesto below was a growth driver for Wise, thanks to customers forwarding it to their friends. Not just a clever bit of copy, it’s the tip of the iceberg of a customer centric culture.

Remember: Stories people want to tell spread faster than anything on the planet.

Phoar, right?! Three cheers for * *checks notes* * money transfer services?

You betcha. But having a worthy mission alone isn’t enough: Wise needed to scale the mission from the few to the many.

Wise’s wisest move: using existing customers to get more customers.

Too many early stage start ups over complicate looking for their customers and writing set in stone plans rather than following the early energy of where your best and most enthusiastic customers are coming from.

This of course is the hard part: far too many companies have no idea who their real customer is.

The third move Wise made was marketing their mission, not just their product.

The holy grail of marketing is word of mouth advertising. The problem is that few businesses do anything that’s actually worth talking about.

People buy on emotional reasons, but justify purchases with logic. Wise has both:

Rational - Faster & cheaper product than the competitionEmotional - Mission

Wise’s marketing mix includes PR, paid social, SEO, affiliate and partnership marketing, but while optimizing channels will grow Wise’s user base, it won’t step change growth. Marketing their mission does.

Wise creates high visibility stunts that look more like community organizing than marketing: but here’s the most important part. Wise actually invites their customers to help be part of the change.

They have:

How do you get people to pay attention to what money is doing? Don’t behave like a financial services company.

Wise ran a petition to collect signatures from customers to expose hidden banking fees and get the government to crack down on hidden fees. They launched a ‘Stop the Exchange Rate Ripoff Report’, commissioned research on the hidden fees, and publicized the hidden fees to great effect to users, even banding together with Monzo and Revolut to call for reform collectively on hidden fees.

Finally, because what was 2010 without a flashmob, Wise got 100 people to ‘expose’ hidden fees by stripping down in front of major London landmarks, staging similar stunts in Paris, Barcelona, New York and Toronto.

Community organizing 101: share a big mission, then enlist people with small asks to help you achieve it.

Wanna be like Wise?

No brand strategy is one-size fits all or copy paste, but what you will never go wrong with is listening to your customers. Here’s 3 takeaways any company can benefit from:

Talk 👏 to 👏 your 👏 customer. When was the last time you spoke to a customer? If it’s been more than a month, it’s been too long. Take calls, make them, open source NPS reviews and feed them into an open Slack channel. Make your customers visible within your organization.Distill what you hear and identify a common enemy. Gather a few folks who talk to customers regularly. Pool reviews, feedback, complaints. Distill it into your mission - and common enemy.Send up marketing test balloons. Post 3-5 different ideas across organic social media. Pick the one that gets the most signal and then double down on it. Bonus points if you can find ways to allow people to participate in the campaign.

Here are two ways I can help you:

1️⃣ Book a paid 1:1 call with me where we can jam on goal-setting, any brand strategy problem, framework, or question you have.

2️⃣ Ask me anything. To ask a question, drop some quick feedback into this 75 second survey.

Finally, one small ask. If you made it this far and you liked what you read, would you consider forwarding this to someone, sharing it, or dropping me a quick note with what you enjoyed or what you’d love to read about next? Shoutout to Robyn, Neol and Blair who have shared lovely words about this newsletter recently! 🙏

✌️Thanks so much for reading - I appreciate your attention!

Amanda