Newly launched investment platform Goldie is giving everyday Kiwis the opportunity to invest in something new: real gold bars. Not content with simply disrupting the investing industry, they’re also disrupting the traditional approach to marketing in this sector.
How many people can say they own a real gold bar? Not many.
Co-founder and Director of investment platform Goldie, Cam Maclachlan, is big on breaking stigmas in the complicated realm that is finance, by giving Kiwis the opportunity to do investment differently – and he’s doing it through gold bars. “Disruption is a big thing that our product does – there’s nothing quite like it in the market,” he says.
Goldie aims to remove the complications that can come with investing. As just one voice in a growing industry providing accessible investment advice, Maclachlan knows Goldie isn’t the only option, but he also knows it’s a highly innovative one. Because the platform embodies invention, he knew they had to focus on that when launching to the public.
“We’re not actually appealing to the educated gold trader, we’re appealing to the everyday Kiwi who has or hasn’t started investing. We knew we had to be disruptive, because we knew that if you needed investment advice, it was already there. We couldn’t be another investing platform that had that same tone of voice – we need to be ourselves and embody a fun aspect.”
In their branding and how they approach collaborative campaigns, the team at Goldie is breaking away from traditional marketing and essentially making fun of themselves. “Our slogan on our tote bags [‘Cash poor, asset rich’] suggests we can’t give investment advice, and we’re going to take that further and further and see how much fun we can have,” says Maclachlan.
By pushing themselves on the marketing front by bringing a new slant, Goldie’s stepping away from traditional marketing that can cause fatigue in this day and age. “Rather than trying to create campaigns that are about our product, [we thought], ‘Why don’t we just focus on having fun in places you would never expect us to be, so you can see exactly what we stand for?’”
Going against the grain is what Goldie has been doing since they launched in 2023 with no budget for advertising – in fact, with practically no budget at all. Instead, they invested in an “educator influencer budget”.
The way they approached this was characteristically unconventional. Maclachlan says they have a no-brief policy when reaching out to their chosen influencers. “We’ve approached you, we trust you, we love what you’re doing, tell us how you think it should [go] and no approvals needed. It’d be naive to approach these people without having full respect for what they’ve done and what they’re doing, because it’s their community, not
ours. We hope their community sees our values and aligns [with us], but it’s purely up to them.”
Goldie hope that by giving their educators free rein, they’ll become known as an approachable brand for regular people. In appealing to regular Kiwis, they’re aiming to keep all of their communications equally easygoing.
Partnering up with influencers isn’t the only marketing road they’ve gone down. They’ve also worked alongside burger joints, a T-shirt brand and a poke bowl company. “Another point of the business is to actually be a desirable brand,” says Maclachlan. “We want to be leaning in to the idea of being a brand people want to be part of. That’s all about being real.”
They’ve nailed this so far, with their tote bags quickly becoming popular on social media, as people post photos of them, creating conversations and making others want to be part of the movement. But where does owning a gold bar (or part of it) fit in with this standout strategy? Well, it doesn’t.
“If you talk about yourself too much – which is interesting because I’m in an interview talking about myself
– but if you talk about yourself to the consumer too much, why do they need to follow you? They’re already following you, they’re already engaging with you,” says Maclachlan.
“Our goal is to engage our communities [in other ways]. When we’ve got something we think you’ll want to follow or you’ll appreciate and you’ll want to see what’s next or see what the next post is, that’s what we want to do.”
Having worked behind the scenes on the project for several years beforehand, the Goldie team found success in this strategy from the moment they launched. In only the first two months of their beta year, they had more than 3,500 sign-ups, beating investment platform Sharesies, which clocked the same number in their first 12 months. Over the recent Christmas and New Year period alone, Goldie saw 200 percent growth, and at the time of writing, they’re expecting to hit 8,000 users, just a few months after they kicked off.
Goldie’s disrupting the traditional template by marketing creatively and authentically and encouraging people to join them. They’re giving Kiwis the opportunity to own part of a real thing, so what better way than to market this than by bringing a real experience to the people?
This was first published in our March/April 2024 issue.
