When it comes to the financial services sector, it’s been another tough year for brand builders.

However, the financial services sector appears to not be taking its brand thumping lightly.

Or at least it has successfully avoided repeating such tone-deaf antics as the February 2009 star-studded party and Sheryl Crow concert bankrolled by Northerntrust, a bank that had recently received $1.6 billion in bailout money.

Asked what brand attributes banks and financial services companies are now diligently working to better expose, Eileen B. Zicchino, chief marketing officer for JP Morgan Treasury Services, said, “I think transparency is clearly important. The big question now is ‘Where is my money?,’ and it wasn’t too long ago that a lot of cash managers didn’t even know the answer to that question.”

For her part, Zicchino is also the chairperson for this year’s Brand Building for Banks & Financial Services, a conference held by Marcus Evans Conferences in lower Manhattan this week. Having brought together marketing executives from big and small financial services companies, the conference examined the complex challenge banks face as they seek to repair their brands in the wake of the financial crisis.

“The hubris is what’s no longer in vogue,” said Zicchino, as she led a question-and-answer session exploring the attributes of brand in financial services. “Especially on the investment banking side — where there was a tendency to elevate ourselves — the sort of masters of the universe in their suspenders — but that’s changed. Now we’re seeing bankers in publications and they’re just in shirtsleeves.”

As part of a presentation titled “Financial Services’ Brand Image: Can We Get Our Mojo Back?,” Michael Rosenberg, managing director, marketing: research & competitive intelligence, JP Morgan Treasury Services, emphasized the importance of having a company’s brand attributes understood by all employees.

“We have to get back to basics and focus on our brand attributes, and then we have to align ourselves correctly so that we can deliver on our promise to our clients,” said Rosenberg, who received an affirmative response from the audience when he asked whether the group believed that banks were succeeding in turning around their brand image.

Another presenter, Omar Saad, global head of brand investing at Credit Suisse, explained how companies that focus on brand building consistently generate bigger returns. For its part, Credit Suisse developed a stock index that compares the performance of the S&P 500 against the stocks of companies that spend at least 2 percent of sales on marketing. The marketing-savvy companies outperformed the S&P 500 by more than 400 basis points. Surprisingly, Omar said that financial services companies still struggle to understand the value of investing in their brands.

“Most people on Wall Street are numbers people, yet brand is soft, it’s fluffy, its image, it’s reputation. The impact that brand has on business is very hard to model, and Wall Street’s lack of understanding of that impact has made the link between the marketing and the financial world weak,” said Omar.

Still, when asked for an example of a powerful Wall Street brand, Omar quickly named Goldman Sachs – certainly a renowned brand, but a company seldom distinguished by its marketing dollars. ###