Morgan Stanley set to relaunch Goldfish

Goldfish, the credit card brand bought by Morgan Stanley’s UK consumer banking group, is to relaunch later this year in an effort to rebuild awareness of the brand.

Morgan Stanley, which recently appointed Grey London to its &£50m through-the-line account (MW last week), is said to be aggressively pursuing a dual brand strategy to increase its share of the UK credit card market.

Central to this strategy is a relaunch of the Goldfish brand, which the group bought from rival Lloyds TSB, says an executive close to the company. It is thought that Grey will work on both the Morgan Stanley and Goldfish brands, but with different teams appointed and strategies pursued. An insider says: “This is a genuine relaunch. There will be few, if any, synergies between the two brands.”

It had been suggested that Morgan Stanley, the American financial services organisation better known in the City for its investment banking arm, had bought the brand with the intention of moving customers over to its Morgan Stanley cards.

However, a Morgan Stanley spokeswoman refutes this. She says: “The appeal of the Goldfish brand for us is that it is very different to that of the Morgan Stanley brand. We can use it to appeal to a different market.”

The Goldfish brand was launched in 1996 by Centrica, then British Gas. It was relaunched in 2002 with a multi-million pound campaign but the brand has had little investment since.