Written by Will Novosedlik

Every year, UK-based brand valuation consultancy Brand Finance publishes a report on the 500 most valuable brands in the world. According to its evaluation, TD Bank has been named the most valuable brand in Canada for 2022.

Brand value is one of the most difficult things to measure in business. As an intangible asset, a brand’s financial value is normally calculated when the company that owns it is about to be acquired. In GAAP accounting rules, this portion of a company’s overall value is called “goodwill,” and it represents the premium paid when one company acquires another company for a price greater than its net asset value.

TD’s ranking means it has not only dominated banking brands in value, but has even surpassed big tech brands like Google and Apple. TD also ranked #11 in the world’s top 100 banking brands and #1 banking brand in Canada. Brand Finance bases its valuation not just on goodwill, but also on overall business and financial results.

We asked Betsey Chung, TD Bank’s CMO, how TD did it. “It comes down to how we behave as a brand in three areas: customer experience, colleague experience and community experience,” she says. That suggests a holistic understanding of the role of brand as an organizing force across the operational spectrum. “What we like to say at TD is that everybody is customer-facing, whether you’re in finance or legal, HR, technology, sales or marketing,” says Chung.

Getting all teams on board with that initiative is no easy task, but Chung tackles it strategically. “A large part of my role in the last year has been to get us to a higher level of customer experience. I consider myself ‘chief agitator’ because I feel someone has to agitate on the customer’s behalf. That means partnering with all the businesses across all the functional areas to really understand where the customer irritants are, and driving the proof points for our brand.”

To help her accomplish that, Chung has developed a simple but rigorous approach. As she explains it: “Our brand pillars and our customer experience pillars are the same. They are to make it easy to do business with us, provide value to our customers in terms of saving them time and money, and deliver trusted advice. The acronym we have created for keeping these pillars in focus is ‘EVA’ (ease, value, advice). That’s our rallying cry.”

It helps that the CEO is on board. According to Chung, CEO Bharat Masrani considers brand and customer experience as two sides of the same coin, and expects to see a monthly customer experience report from all the businesses. The focus of these reports is for businesses to use the EVA framework to report on what customer irritants they are working to solve, and how they are solving them. They do this in a balanced scorecard based on both brand consideration and customer experience, using service level metrics developed in collaboration with Chung.

“In terms of the service level agreements, I’ve always found that focusing on one customer irritant every week and knocking it off is the type of pace that people can accommodate. Now people are literally competing against each other between lines of businesses, trying to outdo each other on how many irritants they resolve, and also how many proof points they have for the brand. Because we highlight them to the CEO every time they have a proof point, the motivation is very high,” says Chung.

That’s the customer experience. What about colleagues? Besides the healthy competition for eliminating irritants, Chung points to various other tactics designed to boost engagement and build culture. For example, “We start every leadership meeting with a customer story. We ask ourselves questions like, how long did it take to resolve that customer irritant? How could we have done better with other customers in a similar situation? We are going to be putting these stories on people’s screen tops. We’re calling them ‘fan mail.’ We’ll have a mix of fan mail that is positive and some where we could have done better,” she says.

Chung likes to consider customers as fans. This plays into community experience, and is largely about sponsorship. Chung explains, “We are really proud to be ‘the bank of music.’ We just launched TD Music Hall, which is part of Massey Hall. We have 72 music festivals coming up in the next few months, including the Junos. Then there’s the Celtics and the Bruins, and TD Garden. At 45 years, that is the longest relationship in sports history, and we have signed on for another 20 years.”

Looking to the future, Chung has five interconnected strategies. Number one is brand consideration and continuing to be number one in rankings like the one conducted by Brand Finance, followed by customer experience and being an agitator for the customer. The third is digital marketing and being able to orchestrate the customer conversation across 26 billion touchpoints, the most of any North American bank. “We have always said that we want to have a personalized, legendary, connected customer experience. As we think about digital marketing and personalization, they’re all connected. We are trying to make sure that we are one TD to the customer across all those touchpoints,” says Chung.

The next strategy is utilizing generative AI. There are marketing capabilities that Chung needs now and into the future so that when a customer wants to engage with the bank, it’s ready. Chung is doing some generative AI use cases, some in the area of complaint handling.

“The fifth is being able to get things done easily for our colleagues,” continues Chung. “Work enablement is very important for us. That’s about getting to market efficiently, and the role of generative AI in making the impossible possible every day. It’s all part of how we’re bridging today with tomorrow.”

One very important item on the bank’s plate is the balance of security and convenience. TD has long been known as the bank of convenience, both here and in the U.S. “In Canada, we have the most branches of any footprint or, or any player,” says Chung. “So we are still number one in convenience. The issue of security comes up in terms of the stability of our platforms, in terms of fraud and in terms of trust.”

TD’s strategies for privacy are also making an impact. “We’ve stood up a customer data platform in Canada and the U.S. for a compliant, cookieless environment, preparing us for a world without third-party data. We’re looking at EU and UK as examples, where privacy regulations are far more stringent and where, as a result, companies like NatWest bank are coming up with some very innovative tools, like password re-setters for online banking. They are taking safety to the next level.”

If privacy and personalization are executed by TD with the same rigour the brand has applied to the execution of its three brand pillars of ease, value and advice, the bank might be on track to hit Chung’s goal of continuing to be ranked high on global values lists.