CMO of RBC Alan Depencier Offers Financial and Tactical Advice to Growing Businesses

Alan Depencier,Chief Marketing Officer at the Royal Bank of Canada.

Alan is the Chief Marketing Officer at the Royal Bank of Canada. Growing up in a small Ontario town, he never thought he would one day become the CMO of RBC. He says he had two passions, one for entrepreneurship because his dad had his own trucking company, and one for marketing. After graduating post secondary, Alan worked for Colgate before starting a business with a few partners for a number of years. Today Alan is working at Canada’s largest bank, and says he loves it because hes able to embrace both of his passions in his role. Focusing on traditional marketing of their tools, products and services, as well as using RBC Ventures to play in the entrepreneurial side of things. “I get to work with really passionate folks that have ideas and we try to bring those to life,” Alan explains, he gets the best of both worlds.

Over the last few years, Alan and his team at RBC have been watching different trends emerge. “Micro-Learning” is just one aspect of this that they have found interesting, the ability to teach anyone a topic in condensed form, in this case, financial tools. RBC partnered with McGill University in Montreal, getting their professors to teach business and financial literacy on a platform that would be available to everyone in a language that anyone can understand without being at university level. Alan says they have had 141 thousand people go through the course since launch last year. You can find the course here.

A second trend they have been focusing on is called “Digical”, a blend of physical and digital. Alan sees RBC as a digitally-enabled relationship bank, and thats starts with a relationship with people. When someone has a more complex need, you really want to talk to someone in person rather than the robot machine on the phone. RBC wants to be sure you have a great experience being in contact with their advisors, while still maintaining a fantastic digital experience. With dealing with the pandemic over the last few months, RBC has really embraced this blend because there is such a perfect blend of both digital and physical solutions.

The third, Alan mentions, is business agility. “Many of the tech firms kind of lead business agility, in terms of speed to market, continually testing, learning and evolving, and we’ve taken those principles at RBC and we’ve been applying them the last few years,” Alan explains, this has been a big culture change for the business considering its age. They’ve been trying to innovate and drive change for their consumers and clients for a better chance of success.

With all of these new trends and ideas emerging, Alan says it can become tricky to know what to try and what to pass on. His team has a way of controlling their strategies because of this, using the investment portfolio approach. 70% of their marketing strategy budget is proven strategies, like blue-chip stocks that they know will create results, 20% is emerging strategies they have confidence in and hope to replace some of those blue-stock ideas but are still unproven, and then 10% are a kind of venture capital which are quick and maybe only 1 in 10 ideas might work for the future.

When it comes to how RBC is looking to grow and improve, Alan touches on their own philosophy: “Our brand promise is really to use the power of imagination and insight to relentlessly improve our human experiences,” Alan expresses, broken down this really means harnessing the power of their knowledge and innovations to help better their clients and push themselves for the better. “We’ve really been pushing our brand to be a little bit more bold, more financial services would not be known as the more bold brands out there, but when you work at a bank there's a large group called risk management men and we kind of use that language internally and we say ‘the cost of being safe actually outweighs the cost of being bold’,” Alan describes, they are willing to take a little more of a risk so they can get out there and be seen by more eyes. This doesn't always mean being bigger and brighter, but having good insights and having relevance that come off in a meaningful way.

Businesses need to be authentic to be heard, “you’ve gotta be true to who you are,” Alan urges. In the world of social media, people have so much access to information that if you are not being true to who you are, you will damage trust and that is the most important thing to have as a brand. Alan also suggests focusing on what your strengths are and what makes you different, and be sure to lean into it. “As you look at your budget and activities, make sure you're spending your time on those things that are really distinctive and your strengths so you continually differentiate yourself vs the competition.” Be sure you're offering quality services, rather than offering everything under the sun; less is more when it comes to quality.

Written by Juliana Bermudez