Papara: a company that had grown on its business model, not its brand
Papara, Turkey’s pioneering neobank, was competing in a crowded market with messaging that pointed in several directions at once. In 2023 I ran a brand audit and customer research and built the brand strategy that followed. Papara was named to CNBC and Statista’s list of the world’s best fintech companies in both 2023 and 2024.
Client: Papara · Sector: Financial services — fintech, neobanking · Market: Turkey · Year: 2023 · My role: Brand strategy · Services: Brand audit, customer survey, brand strategy
The problem
Papara had two audiences that rarely appear in the same brief: people the banking system had never served, and a young, technically fluent generation that expected banking to feel like any other app. The category was filling with competitors offering much the same thing, and the brand’s own messaging was inconsistent enough that its distinct value was hard to state in a sentence.
What I found
The research turned up something the growth figures had been concealing. Most people had heard of Papara through a friend. Not through advertising, not through the brand, but through someone they trusted telling them it worked.
That meant the company had grown on the strength of its business model rather than its brand — an enviable position, and a fragile one. Word of mouth is the cheapest growth there is until a competitor with the same model and a better story arrives, at which point it turns out the brand was never doing any work. Papara did not have a communications problem. It had never had to build a brand, and had reached the point where it could no longer avoid it.
What I did
I audited how the brand presented itself against its competitors, ran customer research across both audiences to establish what was actually driving adoption, and built the brand strategy: a distinct position the company could defend, and the direction for the visual identity and messaging that would carry it.
Why it mattered
In a category where every competitor offers a similar product at a similar price, the brand is what remains when the feature comparison ends in a draw. Realising growth potential meant investing in the one asset the company had so far been fortunate enough not to need.
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