What you need to know:

• Armed with an extended proposition beyond direct home loan lending, a new network of brokers and a broader customer target, Athena is very much entering season 2 as a business, its marketing chief says.
• Having squared up to the fact its value-based proposition no longer holds in the face of 13 interest rate rises, Athena has been working to shift its position and accrue a wider customer base beyond the 35-to-45-year-old refinancer.
• Even though it was originally grounded in price, CMO Sarah Sproule insists Athena’s ‘Love us and leave us’ brand positioning can stretch far enough to incorporate a new set of customer pain points and values.
• To help, she’s putting the emphasis on mid-funnel strength and improving Athena’s ability to “sell, not just service” prospective customer opportunities.
• Critical to making this a reality is cross-functional collaboration between marketing, product and distribution, as well as accountability through the whole customer journey funnel, Sproule says.

Athena CMO Sarah Sproule calls it the home loan upstart’s Season 2. There’s an extended proposition beyond direct to co-create product with brokers. She’s also eyeing off a customer cohort well beyond refinancing 35-45-year-olds. Greater cross-functional collaboration with product and distribution teams is core too, and a mid-funnel optimisation play is in the works, not just bitingly funny and occasionally uncomfortable upper-funnel campaign narratives. Oh, and she’s building a set of superpowers, not just the sole superpower of value based on price.

“How do you evolve Athena into season 2? She’s grown up a little bit. But she’s still the smartest person in the room, has a point of view and she’s still there to do all the right things,” the marketing chief tells Mi3. “But this does necessitate not necessarily toning down things per se, but a maturity. And a maturity that talks to different cohorts.”

Athena came out loudly and proudly in 2019 with a strong position predicated on three core proof points which Sproule admits, were effectively price driven. Its customer value proposition was to pay down your home loan faster, encapsulated through the tagline, ‘Love us and leave us’.

Fast forward to Sproule joining Athena as CMO 18 months ago and you have a vastly different remit to inaugural marketing chief, Natalie Dinsdale. A succession of interest rate rises since May 2022 (13 to date) left the Athena proposition in limbo and the digital-first player fighting a vicious bunch of bigger banks all trying to win the mortgage war.

By the end of the 2023 financial year, Athena had $2.66 billion in loans on its balance sheet compared to $2.8 billion in 2022. It sold $672 million in loans for its partners, down from $760 million the year before. As a result, the company cut back its marketing, sales, professional services and staff wages bill to reduce its losses from $47 million to $29 million for the year.

“As a digital, direct lender with a launch position largely predicated on price, it wasn’t a good place to be,” Sproule says.

The trajectory has firmly been going up since then, and Sproule says Athena is back in growth. Athena co-founder and COO, Michael Starkey, has been saying the same thing over the last six months, reporting a growing loan book along with more investors, buoyed by its decision to get into the broker network last year. According to reports, brokers have settled $1 billion in Mortgage Choice freedom loans – funded by Athena – in under a year.

“I think it’s due to the outstanding job of leadership by the founder plus the ability for this business to strategise and focus on those things that will make a difference,” Sproule comments.

“What that has meant is an evolution of our distribution channels. Previously, we were only a direct business and heavily focused on the refinancers. When the market gets tough, people will flock to brokers as they are the experts and people want them to make it easier for them. We pivoted at that right time and happily, I can say we’re extremely busy for all the right reasons.”

That’s product. In addition, it’s required a fundamental rethink of the customer value and brand proposition Athena has been operating around thus far.

“We’re very famous for ‘Love us and leave us’, which is a stroke of genius and not something we’re looking to evolve. But what we had done was really focus on the ‘leave us’ part, because people don’t want a home loan. So we focused very heavily on the reasons why you’ll leave us, which is why you’ll love us,” Sproule says.

“What we have had to do – and in one sense this was accelerated because of the change in market and macro-economic environment, but was always on the map – is ride the maturity curve faster. In order to have resilience in different market cycles, which was always on the plan, we didn’t expect it to be as accelerated as it was, we need to add more breadth to the CVP and not just talk to price.

“We had to broaden out the products we had in the offer, as we had focused very much on owner refinancing. It was also about what else we have and can build to give us more volume in higher-margin segments. We have brought out a very solid investor proposition, we’re in the process of building out additional products which I can talk about a bit further down the line, and we had to look at what are our other superpowers beyond price and how this concept of ‘fair value’ ladders up to be more fair in scope and extensible as a brand attribute.

“We will start and continue to take to market these things over the next 12 months.”

The question of loving and leaving Athena

Another superpower Sproule believes in is Athena’s ‘Love us and leave us’ brand positioning, which she insists can flex to encompass the evolving business model and proposition.

“There have been a lot of questions internally around whether ‘Love us and leave us’ fits beyond where we were – is there stretch beyond what we launched with, which was no fees, loyalty is royalty, and accelerated home loan payments – those core proof points and all the reasons you can leave us,” she says.

“My view is hands down, yes there is. Arguably, it’s one of the most salient brand positions for our size and spend within the category and market. It’s certainly not something you want to look at changing without all due consideration. For me, while we’ve spoken about the reasons to leave us, it’s about how we talk to all the reasons to love us. There’s a lot in there we haven’t really unpacked, so that’s how I am looking to go to market.

“Irrespective of whether you’re an investor looking to hold onto property or a refinancer, ultimately the thing you still want is the asset; you want to think it of as your own, not necessarily the bank’s. I think our proposition stacks up against that.”

However, big campaign work has been on hold while Athena puts emphasis on the product and distribution side of the business. With 75 per cent of the market using a broker, it’s been vital to pivot the team to focus on landing that channel. But what Sproule insists on is the same principles and approach Athena took to direct are taken to the broker category.

“We have been in genuine co-creation with brokers and aggregators around building out product, policy, go-to-market experiences that again, do the very same thing Athena did when we launched in 2019 – vastly different, vastly better,” Sproule says.

To this end, and with the aim of evolving the brand, position and customer proposition in direct in concert, Sproule put a toe in the water to test some versions of messaging in March. “At a test level they were highly effective… we have some things in the works from September,” she says.

“As marketers and creatives, we love the go-to-market pieces. When we can go out and be loud and proud – that was one of the attractive things for me with this brand – it’ll be great. But at the moment, it’s deep, strategic, dig heels in, get everyone set up, get every part of the teams and business across every part of that customer journey so it’s humming, because that’s where we need to be to make every dollar count.”

From agency to client-side

Up until 2020, Sproule was on agency side, working for AKQA, Adapptor, Spin Communications and her own agency, Gun Communications. She then joined Bank of Melbourne as acting head of brand and marketing experience plus Westpac’s Victorian business in 2020, and was promoted to head of in-house agency, Westpac Media and Marketing, in January 2022.

“Athena at its core is a tech business but we operate in financial services. I was formerly in digital agencies and loved being so close to the fastest-paced industry tech is in terms of change and how we leverage all of that in marketing,” Sproule comments. “I also wanted to go into financial services because having been agency side for my career, working on amazing brands and businesses, I wanted to work on one thing and I wanted to be at the coalface, at the table, ideally in an industry that has an impact on so many people’s lives. Athena was the culmination of those things.”

Then there’s the fact Sproule watched the Athena brand “from afar through envious eyes and also with adoration because it was so different, fun and built categorically on solving customer pain points in the home loan business”.

Sproule has the full ‘big M’ marketing remit, including digital and CX, plus marketing automation. “I don’t think you can operate as a CMO today without having that remit. How can you meet customer expectations if you’re not fully across all those details? Supporting that though has to be a cadence and operational structure that’s truly cross-functional,” she says.

“What we have been looking at doing has been highly strategic, looking at the brand, how we diversify in terms of channel and product, and how we flex our muscle in selling. That isn’t just from a marketing perspective.”

A particular emphasis is on how to get Athena’s mid-funnel working harder. So that when Sproule does turn the tap back on upper funnel channels to a far greater capacity to start selling, it flows through to conversion and settlement – and marketing can account for every inch of its contribution along the way.  

“We’re talking about how we become a business that’s genuinely accountable. What are we doing with every unique that hits the site? That necessitates that cross-function and co-accountability across distribution, product and marketing,” Sproule continues.

“It’s something the business always intended to do, but we didn’t have the time to do it as we’d been so busy with servicing. If we’re going to turn things back on, what do we want out of every dollar we spend, what is the return on that in terms of marketable audience, customer lifetime value – all of those things. It’s the plumbing or the engineering that sits behind it all. That’s a huge focus.”

Having deep collaboration from the top down and across the three disciplines of marketing, distribution and product has therefore been a huge priority.

“It’s a superpower for Athena and means we can execute at pace. We’re deeply connected to customers on all fronts,” Sproule adds.

The Athena customer of 24/25

Which leads us to who Athena’s customer is in 2024 and going into 2025. Sproule says the team has a much clearer pictures of the multi-cohort make-up of its target customer now. Enter the idea of Season 2.

“It’s about knowing we have different superpowers we need to be famous for. We don’t just want to be a simple digital lender, so how do you start to pull that out and what does it mean across your different cohorts? When you want to be more than one thing to one person, you’re not as single-minded,” she says.

“I often describe Athena as an attitude – it’s getting shit done, solving better than anyone else can solve. You can take that idea – and it is an attitude – and take it into whichever cohort you’re going after. You can tell from the evolution on the site there’s the home owner, there’s the investor and it’ll continue to build out.

“We know investor is a sweet spot for Athena and it’s the type of customer we are attracting because we’re going hard after it with a proposition and product that’s really strong. We will extend into all different segments of the market: Owner / purchaser, first-home buyers or more sophisticated segments in terms of complexity of their borrowing needs – we are looking at the potential to go to all those different cohorts and build a brand that can support that.”

The wealth of data and insight at Sproule’s disposal is helping crystallise these cohort needs.

“We have a process, ‘middle out’, which is: What do we learn from alternative channels we’re in; what do we learn from broker we can reference in direct; what do we learn from direct we can reference in broker; what do we learn from our analysis in terms of who is doing what on site? We use BigQuery to look at different patterns on site, journeys and conversion points, for example,” Sproule explains.

“It’s interesting because they’re all vastly different depending on who it is. But the point is, when I joined, because we had been in that servicing mindset, rather than selling, it felt like marketing’s job ended at an application. The whole business has been geared around CPA. Now that is important, but there are measures sitting above and way below that which are equally important. There are brand metrics – which we know are important, and they may not be the hard metrics people in the c-suite want to see, but they’re indicators of health, future customers. We’re trying to bring more of that into the conversation, but also putting marketing on the hook all the way through to final conversion, which is settlement. We’re getting very specific around different conversion points through the whole funnel flow – I don’t just mean the marketing funnel, but the actual customer journey funnel – and it’s deeply analytical.

“Athena at market level was born to solve customer pain points through product, policy and policy. It was people around a table architecting how we solve this, what’s the best approach so people feel valued as a customer. Never giving a new customer a better rate – simple. How do we foster loyalty being royalty – because you’re in a category where you get a better deal by just changing every year or so. They are genuine product features that have been co-authored by marketing, product and distribution. Then we take them to market together.”

The 12-month horizon

For Sproule, success in 12 months’ time looks like improved full journey conversion.

“How we leverage against the interest, awareness and consideration we have in market and pull that all the way through is massively important to me,” she says. “We want to go back out in 2025 and turn the tap on at the top again and know how to capitalise on that. There is immense business value in that.”

Item two in terms of go-to-market is an evolved brand proposition. To that end, Sproule plans to have new work in market early 2025. The third piece is getting B2B humming.

“We want to have some fun in B2B and do things a bit differently,” she adds. “Having shaken up the B2B space within broker marketing would also be something I’d be very proud of.”