UBS Case Study

Enhancing Global Brand Management Capabilities

The Challenge

UBS, one of the world's leading financial services companies, expanded its operations significantly through a series of mergers and acquisitions. While the company possessed enormous business strength, it lacked international brand awareness and recognition in key markets. UBS engaged Prophet to develop a brand strategy that would enable it to build a brand that matched the success of its business, and supported its desire to further develop an integrated business model.

Our Solution

Over the past five years, Prophet has served as a strategic advisor and partner to UBS, helping to develop its strategy and ensure its effective implementation. Our approach started with a global audit of UBS' brand management capabilities and a methodological approach to developing a new brand strategy. This included comprehensive qualitative and quantitative market research, which found a remarkable congruence of needs between different customer segments, and set the stage for its new “one-brand” strategy. Prophet also worked closely with UBS to ensure that the organization was prepared to deliver on this new brand promise focused on “the relentless pursuit of client success.” This included the creation of a new group-wide branding function, the development of the optimal marketing organization and measurement system, and employee training to support the strategy.

Results

As a result of these efforts, Prophet helped transform UBS from a perceived regional brand to a top 50-ranked global brand with a value of over $8.7 billion. Furthermore since the shift to the single brand strategy, UBS' share price has increased more than 170%--over 4 times the industry average and over 4 times performance of S&P 500.