BankMarketingCenter

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again:  I’m not an economist. While I certainly look to the experts for information, more often than not I base my opinions on my own “empirical” experiences, i.e., what I observe. For purposes of this article, what I’ve been reading about and experiencing for myself, is the trend in home improvement spending. Now, we all know that home improvement spending has hit record highs over the last eighteen months; up in 2021 by 28% from 2020. The question is, will the gains in household spending continue, especially given the inflationary rise in household furnishings prices we’ve seen lately.

According to CNBC in their February 10 article, “Here is how Inflation is Hitting Everything You Buy for Your Home”:

• Floor coverings: 0.8% month over month, 7.2% year over year
• Window coverings: 1.8% month over month, 16.2% year over year
• Furniture/bedding: 2.4% month over month, 17% year over year
• Bedroom furniture: 1.8% month over month, 13.7% year over year
• Clocks, lamps and decorator items: 2.7% month over month, 6.3% year over year
• Living room/kitchen/dining room furniture: 2.2% month over month, 19.9% year over year
• Appliances: 1.5% month over month, 8.5% year over year

Sure, prices on home furnishings have gone up. But does that mean that folks are done spending on their homes?  I don’t think so. The article goes onto say that “People tend to upgrade home furnishings after they remodel” and we’re just now on the tail end of the greatest home remodeling era in history. To me, and this is proven out I believe by the foot traffic in home furnishings stores, we are now in a “post remodeling” home furnishings boom.

In late November of last year, Furniture Today made this prediction in an article entitled Spruce-up Splurge: “A new coat of paint, the addition of a piece of accent furniture, some updated wall art — it all adds up to become part of a larger redecorating budget for consumers, many of whom plan to spend between $2,000 and $4,999 on their home décor in a year’s time. Our study found that 26% of all respondents — with little variation by age group — plan to spend that amount over a 12-month period beginning in mid-2021. Another nearly 40% expected to commit between $500 and $1,999, again, fairly evenly distributed by generation. Meanwhile, at 11%, Baby Boomers are the most likely to ante $10,000 or more when sprucing up their homes.”

Building material retailers, furniture and home décor retailers, security system dealers… there’s a tremendous amount of money changing hands here. And while the hands accepting the cash represent a wide variety of service and product providers, they all have one thing in common:  It's really not “cash” that’s exchanging hands here. It’s credit.

The home furnishings store aisles are crowded not just with shoppers, but messaging around buy now, pay later programs. Go into any home décor store and you’ll see signs down every aisle, encouraging shoppers to make a purchase now (regardless of whether they can truly afford to or not) and not worry about paying for it until later. The Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) industry is booming, having generated nearly $100 billion in 2020, and projected to reach $3.98 trillion by 2030.

What does this mean for community banks?  Here at BankMarketingCenter.com, we believe that this is an opportunity for banks to build their business by offering their customers alternative financing… financing that would, for instance, help improve their credit score. That’s because, unbeknownst to many BNPL borrowers, these point-of-sale loans do not routinely appear on most credit reports. That means a good payment record on your buy now, pay later account won't help you build credit. Another “favor” you’re doing your customers?  The Financial Brand points out that “16% of users admit to having had regrets over BNPL purchases. Among the reasons: the purchase was ultimately too expensive; late fees were high; easy credit led to buying something not needed; and finding that some lenders’ policy of not putting BNPL deals through credit bureaus meant the debt did not build credit.”

Why not take this opportunity to let your customers know that you offer the kind of financing that truly makes sense and meets their needs?  Personal loans, for instance or better still, a HELOC, where they only pay interest on what they actually spend? If you’re a community bank and this appeals to you, the good news is that we’ve already created the messaging! All you need to do is visit our site to learn how you can easily customize it with your brand colors and logo, change the copy if you wish, and choose from the thousands of fee-free images we offer. You can do all of the above without any special software of any design skill whatsoever. Our financial industry marketing professionals have already done all of the work for you!

About Bank Marketing Center

Here at BankMarketingCenter.com, our goal is to help you with that topical, compelling communication with customers; the messaging — developed by banking industry marketing professionals, well trained in the thinking behind effective marketing communication — that will help you build trust, relationships, and revenue. In short, build your brand. To view our campaigns, both print and digital, visit BankMarketingCenter.com. Or, you can contact me directly by phone at 678-528-6688 or email at nreynolds@bankmarketingcenter.com.

Let me take you back, briefly, to my early days in “the business,” that being the advertising/marketing industry. As I’m sure you know by now, I started my career as an art director at J. Walter Thompson in Chicago.  Not to date myself or anything, but “back then,” as it were, we didn’t use computers.  For some of you younger folk, this may conjure up images of me commuting to work on horseback, but it wasn’t quite that long ago. In fact, computers didn’t come onto the ad agency scene until sometime, if memory serves, in the mid 1990s. So, in actuality it wasn’t that long ago.

Before working on computers, we did everything by hand.  We would literally “cut” type and paste it onto what was called a “mechanical.” We resized images using a stat camera in a darkroom and when the mechanicals were completed, they were sent out to an engraver, who then photographed them and sent the film to the publication for printing.

My point is this: While computers made our jobs easier, and we could be five times more productive, they didn’t make us better art directors.  Computers couldn’t teach us color science, the proper use of fonts, the art of composition, and they certainly couldn’t teach us how to think conceptually when developing a campaign for a client. The computer was just another tool… not unlike the relationship between a painter and their brush.

Ok so much for the “brief” history. I mention this because I see new technologies and “tools” coming online every day. Marketing automation is the big deal now. The goal seems to be to do more with less by using AI and machine learning… in place of human beings.

There’s only one problem.  Software doesn’t think (although we seem to be getting closer and closer to this all the time.). I look out at the template-based design software out there and I think of my early days. A computer is nothing more than a tool. Software companies that are selling “marketing messaging made easy” through off-the-shelf templates are no different. Can a template-driven design program apply Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to a print ad or digital banner, resulting in a message that truly resonates with an audience?  Not that I know of; at least not yet anyway.

If you don’t recall our blog from around last November, when we talked about Maslow, we mentioned him because in order to create truly effective, compelling marketing messaging, one must think like a marketer.  And you can’t do that if you’re not totally in tune with Maslow’s thinking.

Again, I’ll be brief!? Maslow was a 20th Century psychologist who figured out that each person has five levels of needs. He called this his “hierarchy of needs.” To illustrate this, he built a triangle. At the bottom of the triangle was the need for basics such as food and clothing. In the middle were safety and friendship. At the top was self-actualization. Why is this important to marketers? When we are developing the marketing messaging around our products, we want to talk to that audience at the very highest level of the triangle, and that’s because the higher up you go in the triangle the more important, and emotional, that level of need becomes. Food and shelter needs, for instance, can be easily met while understanding who you are and why you're on this planet is not so easy.

Marketers use Maslow's triangle because it helps us keep in mind that when we're talking to our customers about products and services, such as IRAs, CDs, and various types of accounts, we can’t simply talk to them in terms of how these products meet a basic need. Instead, we need to put those products and services in the context of those much more compelling, “top of the triangle” needs such as peace of mind, security, an enhanced quality of life…. Establishing a Living Trust isn’t just a way to protect your money… It's a means to provide for loved ones.  A loan isn’t simply a means to make a purchase. It can mean freedom, comfort, enjoyment.  That’s what our marketing messaging must be designed to do.

Yes, a template-driven software application can make the creation of marketing products quick and easy. And they’re usually priced accordingly; fairly inexpensive. But, they have nothing to offer in terms of the marketing “thinking.” Which means that whatever money one might save by using them was not a savings at all but instead a waste.

As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on this subject.

About Bank Marketing Center

Here at BankMarketingCenter.com, our goal is to help you with that topical, compelling communication with customers; the messaging — developed by banking industry marketing professionals, well trained in the thinking behind effective marketing communication — that will help you build trust, relationships, and revenue. In short, build your brand. To view our campaigns, both print and digital, visit BankMarketingCenter.com. Or, you can contact me directly by phone at 678-528-6688 or email at nreynolds@bankmarketingcenter.com.

What do bananas and baking soda have to do with bank marketing? I thought you would never ask. Let’s start with the bananas…

If I were to hold up a bunch of bananas and asked an audience what they were, most would probably agree they were bananas. But if I held up a green banana and asked the same audience how many would buy this particular banana, less than half would raise their hands. And if I held up a banana that had already turned dark, even fewer would probably want to buy this banana.

As you can see, we are not really selling bananas! We are selling banana skins. People buy bananas based on what the banana skin looks like. In light of this fact, a smart produce manager would market bananas in different ways, understanding that some people prefer ripe bananas, while others prefer green or darker bananas. Perhaps he could market the dark bananas alongside recipes for banana pudding and even place them next to the vanilla wafers. Maybe he could even add a headline like, “Ready for Grandma’s Banana Pudding?” He might market the green bananas to folks heading out on a vacation, with a headline like, “Traveling Bananas – they’ll be ripe when you get there!”

A good marketer can take a product that many people think of as one thing and sell it in different ways.

Now let’s talk about baking soda. This is a product that has been around for over a hundred years and there are thousands of ways to use it. A good marketer might list some of these many uses on the side of the package.

You can brush your teeth with it, put it in cat litter to eliminate odors, clean pots and pans with it, eliminate odors in the refrigerator, use it as an antacid, polish silver with it, or even clean batteries. That’s how baking soda was marketed for years. Then, one day a very smart marketer decided that he would put this same baking soda in a box with “Fridge-N-Freezer” on the front alongside a tagline that read, “30 days of freshness in every box.” He also decided to charge $.10 more per box. And guess what? People started paying $.10 more per box just to have a picture of a refrigerator on the front of the packaging! 

Then this very smart marketer decided that if people would pay more to have a picture of a refrigerator on the front of the box, they might pay even more to have a picture of a cat on the front. After all, people spend millions of dollars each year on their pets. They put a picture of a cat on the front of the box advertising it as “Cat Litter Deodorizer” with “Activated Baking Soda” and starting charging over one dollar more per box! (I love the tagline “Activated Baking Soda.” I wonder who would buy non-activated baking soda? I guess people are willing to pay more for their baking soda to be activated!) This proved to be so successful that before you knew it, baking soda was in every aisle of the grocery store with many different product names and profit margins ten times that of the old-fashioned baking soda in the plain old box.

This brings us to banking. I’m sure you are wondering; what do green bananas and baking soda have to do with banking? Well, it has everything to do with banking! For hundreds of years, banks have marketed and advertised themselves as plain old generic banks. A few got creative and started calling themselves community banks.

Throughout history, we have given our kids piggy banks for them to put their money in and taught them how to take it out only in a real emergency (when it was time to buy some candy!) Most of us have grown up believing that you put your money in a bank and the bank keeps it for you until you need it. Historically, banks advertised CDs and money market accounts to get us to put the money in the bank, and promoted car loans, mortgages, and home equity loans to lend it out – all while making a small margin in the middle.

But the last few years have changed all of this. Now is the time for a really smart marketer to apply the “green banana” concept to the banking industry. We need to realize that every individual and business has different banking needs. For example, a large apartment community collects dozens of checks every day throughout the month. And each day, the apartment manager leaves at noon to take the checks to the bank and go to lunch. But before they go to the bank, they make copies of the checks and fax them back to headquarters to let them know which residents have paid their rent. Some apartment managers might decide to collect the checks and make a daily run to the bank. 

Both solutions are inefficient. A smart bank marketing manager would target those apartment communities with personalized and customized marketing materials that explain how their bank can eliminate the pain of copying checks, faxing checks, and going to the bank every day to deposit them. These marketing messages would talk about the many benefits of remote deposit capture, ACH, and Lock Box services, for example, and even include the apartment community’s name or logo. A smart marketer could even create an additional piece targeting the apartment community’s corporate headquarters, making them aware of the potential liabilities of having their managers driving around town with thousands of dollars at any given time. This marketing piece would also discuss the many benefits of remote deposit capture and how managers, if they utilized this service, they would be able to see images of the actual checks instead of faxed copies. And even more importantly, deposits could be made in minutes without requiring anyone to leave the property.

And, of course, customers utilizing remote deposit capture are a prime candidate for online bill pay and e-statements. In fact, that same smart marketer could develop an “Apartment Banking” product line that promotes all the bank’s services that an apartment community could use. They could even buy the web domain name ApartmentBanking.com for $9.99 to promote their apartment banking products. (This name is still available, but you’d better hurry!)

The bottom line is this: There is no reason you can’t have an Apartment Banking product – just like you can have “Cat Litter Baking Soda.” And this doesn’t just apply to apartment communities. You can target different industries with this same concept. Find out what each industry needs that is unique and position your products around them. Sure, your bank can work with any industry, but you’ll get more business – and possibly better margins – by positioning and marketing yourself in different “aisles.”

About Bank Marketing Center

Here at BankMarketingCenter.com, our goal is to help you with that vital, topical, and compelling communication with customers; messaging that will help you build trust, relationships, and revenue. In short, build your brand. To view our campaigns, both print and digital, visit BankMarketingCenter.com. Or, you can contact me directly by phone at 678-528-6688 or email at nreynolds@bankmarketingcenter.com.

As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on this subject.

Since the very beginning of community banking, these home-grown institutions have enjoyed a distinct advantage over a vast number of financial institutions. Historically, community bank customers have lived near their branch locations and felt a strong personal connection to the bank and its brand. Not anymore.

How financial institutions rely on brand value

Like any product or service category, bank brands rely on brand loyalty; now more than ever. Today, choosing a bank seems hardly different from walking down a supermarket aisle and choosing a cereal, toothpaste, or detergent. As far as banks go, there’s little to no difference between the products nor the ingredients that go into them. The one viable difference between them though, is feeling. This feeling is what drives brand loyalty, and it’s all made made possible by branding. 

Why branding is particularly challenging in 2022

For starters, technology has all but eliminated the word “community” from “community bank.” Cultivating an attractive brand experience was easy back in the days when that brand experience was almost exclusively in-branch. Those days are gone, but thanks to technology, banking customers not only enjoy a greater number of choices, but the expectations now rest on the banks for a better and more personalized customer experience. 

More Choices

More choices, of course, are the result of increased mobility and online banking, where the customer is no longer limited to the institutions nearest them. Mobile apps for financial products and services are going live almost weekly and are extremely attractive to time-pressed customers who can research options with little to no effort. Everything they need is readily available and it’s easier than ever to select a bank without ever stepping into a branch. 

Greater Expectations

With this increased mobility thanks to online banking, brand loyalty has taken on a greater importance, as well as a greater challenge, for many community banks; a challenge that was intensified by the 2020 pandemic and persists today. Due to the drastic improvement and application of technological features and functionality, driven by machine learning and AI and apparent in other sectors such as healthcare (i.e. telemedicine and online appointment scheduling), customers now have heightened expectations when it comes to personalized service. 

Address them both with a more personalized experience

Jill Castilla, CEO of Citizens Bank of Edmond, OK, had this to say last July in How Community Banks Can Stay Relevant in the Face of a Digital Assault. Consumer banks must “strive to maintain a personal touch with those they serve,” she said. “As a community bank, we know our customers and make ourselves available when they need us,” she says. “One of our values at Citizens is to be authentic and accessible.”  During the pandemic, she recalls the community suffering. “We could truly empathize with our neighbors and respond quickly to assist them in challenging times. This kind of response just doesn’t happen at the larger banks. Our customers trust us to have their best interest in mind.”

That “best interest” is the feeling we talked about earlier, the one you might get from an otherwise just-like-every-other product in the detergent aisle. Some call it a brand pillar, which we can perhaps talk about in a later blog. For now, suffice to say that it’s one of the aspects of your brand that, potentially, sets you apart from that sea of competitors. And it’s much more than just a personalized digital banking experience. It’s a personalized experience across every channel.

“Don’t change that channel!”  Well, perhaps you should.

First came multichannel marketing, then, omnichannel. What’s the difference? The multichannel approach focused on sharing a brand's message with customers across multiple channels, or media, with the goal of a customer call-to-action. An omnichannel approach had a slightly different goal, one to create a more personalized message by using data to better understand the consumer and integrating all of the channels to communicate the message. Now, there’s microchannel.

The microchannel approach to building a brand takes omnichannel a step further by slicing consumer touch points into smaller pieces... micro pieces. In the ever-evolving digital world, in order to truly communicate your brand effectively demands a focus on creating an experience “fabric”, one that enables you to meet the consumer wherever they are. With this fabric, you can create a cohesive experience across all of your brand touch points; from community events and traditional media such as print and broadcast to web presence and social media. Using data and analytics, you can make this fabric seamless, so that the consumer moves through the journey without interruption; there’s no “starting over.” Think of microchannel marketing as the digital doors through which the consumer can enter and experience your brand.

If you’re thinking of branding and a personalized banking experience only in terms of online services and mobile apps, you’re missing the bigger picture. Today’s technology can, yes, create a feeling of alienation. But, utilized properly, it can also build connections and relationships. That’s what community banks must continue to do, especially when they can no longer rely on building those relationships in traditional ways.

About Bank Marketing Center

Here at BankMarketingCenter.com, our goal is to help you with that vital, topical, and compelling communication with customers; messaging that will help you build trust, relationships, and revenue. In short, build your brand. To view our campaigns, both print and digital, visit BankMarketingCenter.com. Or, you can contact me directly by phone at 678-528-6688 or email at nreynolds@bankmarketingcenter.com. As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on this subject.

Ad agency folks are famous for their metaphors. When we came up with a campaign idea, for instance, and were curious to know whether it would pass muster or not, we’d say, “lets run it up the flagpole and see who salutes it,” or “we’ll put it out on the stoop and see if the cat licks it up.” When we were working on a campaign and felt that, from a strategic point of view, our messaging was not being directed to the appropriate target audience, we’d call that “shooting at ducks that aren’t really there.”

I just recently saw some statistics around financial industry marketing budgets. Now, I guess I’m reminiscing a bit because any mention of “budget” brings me back to those ad agency days, when your survival hinged on a client’s budget. Every one of us assigned to the account was either working or worrying; working to grow the brand or worrying that the client might find a reason to cut their budget. We never lost a client to another agency, but I remember the host of downturns that sent shockwaves through the agencies where I worked. As soon as the client got a whiff of an economic slowdown, the marketing budget was always the first to go and with it, the agency personnel who worked on that account. (Often, unfortunately, it included agency personnel who WEREN'T working on that account, which was even more frightening.) When the economy turned around, we were always the last to see the benefit of the rebound. I suppose it was because clients tended to feel a bit “once bitten twice shy”. They wanted to be certain, before recommitting to the agency and spending more money, that the recovery was real and long lasting.  We’re in one of those downturns right now, and we’re seeing the same response: Reduced spending on marketing.

The Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2021-2022 revealed that the cuts in the financial industry are pretty dramatic; “marketing budgets as a percent of overall company revenue dropped to their lowest levels in history — to 6% in 2021 from 11% in 2020. Despite facing in-year budget cuts in 2020 due to the pandemic,” says the survey, “most CMOs expected budgets to bounce back in 2021. This budgetary optimism was misplaced, as marketing budgets have fallen to their lowest level in the history of the survey.” Forbes says that “these findings reflect not only an ongoing downward pressure on marketing spend caused by the pandemic, but also a strategic shift in enterprise resource allocation decisions.” According to Gartner, the marketing budget dollars are shifting from marketing to martech solutions; that banks are redirecting the dollars they would ordinarily dedicate to building brand and promoting products/services toward their “digital transformation.” 

In response, those in charge of marketing (the CMO if your bank is large enough and fortunate enough to have one) “are reimagining the capabilities that can be supported by their internal teams.” In other words, bringing the work in house. Nearly 30% of the work previously done by outside agencies, in fact, has been moved to in-house resources in the last 12 months.

So, in summation, what we now have are smaller marketing budgets managed in house, and more often than not, by staff members who have suddenly found themselves with added responsibilities. In other words, a stretched staff, that frankly has neither the funding or the time, to continue to do what banks must do: Sell themselves. Not just “even” during tough times but “because” of tough times.

What I mean is this: The ducks are out there. Simply because banks are compelled to race to the best digital experience doesn’t mean that they can take a vacation from building their brand, differentiating themselves, building trust and relationships… 

ON24’s “2021 B2B Marketing Trends Report: How to Augment the Marketing Organization for a Digital-First Future” speaks to the damage that cuts in a marketing budget can do: “If companies stay flat, freeze, or dramatically reduce their spend in marketing and sales now, they are less likely to recover fast enough against their market competition when the time arises.”

Traditionally, brand awareness has been the ultimate goal of every marketing strategy. With digital transformation we’ve seen a massive shift toward performance marketing — metrics-driven, online marketing campaigns in search of clicks or conversions — and away from brand/relationship building.  There’s a clear danger in this. ON24 has this to say about it: “The truth is, performance marketing may create a jump in short term sales, but it won’t keep your customers coming back again and again. You can sustain performance only with a concurrent brand campaign.”

Are banks running that “concurrent brand campaign”? I can tell you this: The successful ones, the ones that will come out of this downturn stronger, are. There’s no better time for your marketing messaging to stand out in your crowd of competitors than those times when your competitors are silent.

Like I said, those ducks are out there. Take the shot. Especially now, when you can be the only one in the blind.

About Bank Marketing Center

Here at BankMarketingCenter.com, our goal is to help you with that vital, topical, and compelling communication with customers; messaging that will help you build trust, relationships, and revenue. In short, build your brand. To view our campaigns, both print and digital, visit BankMarketingCenter.com. Or, you can contact me directly by phone at 678-528-6688 or email at nreynolds@bankmarketingcenter.com.

As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on this subject.

 Photo courtesy of PR Week Magazine

I’m somewhat ashamed to say this, since I’m such a fan of P&G, but until just recently, I had no idea that Procter & Gamble had a ”Wall of Failures” at their headquarters. I’d been there in the 90’s, when I was working for an agency that handled several of their brands. Unfortunately, the idea to create a tribute to “the one that bombed” didn’t arrive until around 2018. It’s a great idea and I regret having missed it during my visits.

The reason I mention P&G and their wall is because this is a company that I truly admire. A while back, we talked about the 5 Ps of the Marketing Mix and, along what that, the importance of positioning and branding. Now, here is a company, in my opinion, that knows a thing or two on the subject... and even they have had spectacular failures!

Let's face it, we all make mistakes and when it comes to marketing, which is an extremely complex discipline, those mistakes are bound to happen... even when you're putting in your best efforts. P&G is a company that loves research and testing. Even then, they've had products that didn't make it.  And, they've had a lot of time to learn, as well. Remember the brand that launched this packaged goods giant, Ivory Soap? The soap that floats because it's "99 and 44/100ths percent pure?  That was the late 19th Century!

Now, I may be a bit biased — having spent nearly a decade of my agency days contributing to the messaging that would launch more than a handful of P&G brands — but in my humble opinion, no one does it better than they do. The agency never collaborated with them on a launch that didn't involve in-depth research, both qualitative and quantitative. Constant concept testing, as well. Which is why "99 and 44/100ths percent" of their new product launches are successful. And for that reason, I think there’s something to be learned from the fact that they feel the need for a "Wall of Failures."

Here’s a company that currently manages somewhere around 70 brands.  And, sure, they’ve had some notable “missteps” (to be kind), like Fabreze Scentstories, Clairol Touch of Yogurt Shampoo, and their Charmin Spacemaker, but their batting average is still pretty extraordinary.

Adobe Workfront, in an article, “8 Reasons why your marketing campaign failed,”  pretty much sums up my point here: “ After weeks of planning, strategizing, and creating your marketing campaign, it falls flat after it launches. What do you do now? Throw in the towel? Look for a new career path? Of course not. Failure is a reality of content marketing and we’re all bound to experience it at some point. What’s important is how you respond. Figure out what went wrong so you can make necessary adjustments.” According to Workfront, there are eight reasons for failure:

1. You Didn’t Identify the Proper Persona
2. You Had Insufficient Research
3. You Didn’t Have Correct or Realistic Success Metrics
4. You Created the Wrong Message for Your Audience
5. You Delivered Content at the Wrong Time of the Buyer’s Journey
6. You Didn’t Give the Campaign Enough Time
7. You Failed to Meet Regulatory or Brand Compliance Guidelines
8. Your Product Fell Short of Your Claims

That’s a pretty good list. After all, we marketers now live in an age where, thanks to marketing automation and technologies, making mistakes is, frankly, getting increasingly difficult. Numbers 1-8 above are, well, easy. In fact, it's getting to where not identifying your persona, creating the wrong message at the wrong time, and targeting the wrong individual is nearly impossible. So, given all of the resources available to ensure that you DON'T fail, why does it still happen? Maybe the reason why is also the reason why we all need a Wall of Failures. As Henry Ford is quoted on the wall as saying, “the only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”

And maybe that needs to be 9. You didn’t learn from your mistakes.

About Bank Marketing Center

Here at BankMarketingCenter.com, our goal is to help you with that vital, topical, and compelling communication with customers; messaging that will help you build trust, relationships, and revenue. In short, build your brand. To view our campaigns, both print and digital, visit BankMarketingCenter.com. Or, you can contact me directly by phone at 678-528-6688 or email at nreynolds@bankmarketingcenter.com.

In our last blog, we talked a bit about marketing messaging and some of the art and science that goes into creating a compelling, relevant, message.  Since then, I had the opportunity to catch an ad campaign that, for once in a long time, (in my own humble opinion, anyway) puts some of that art and science to work in a beautiful way.

First, remember Abe Maslow? If you recall, Maslow was the psychologist who figured out that each person has about five levels of needs. He called this his “hierarchy of needs” and to visualize it, he built a triangle. At the bottom of the triangle was the need for basics such as food and clothing. In the middle were safety and friendship. At the top was self-actualization.

If you recall from our last post, this is important because when we are developing the marketing messaging around our products, we want to talk to our audience at the very highest level of the triangle. And that’s because the higher up you go in the triangle, the more important (and emotional), that level of need becomes. I used the example of the hitchhiker and their sign. Which one gets the ride faster?  “Miami” or “Home for Thanksgiving with Mom”? The latter of the two, of course: The one that appealed to the emotions of the driver who stopped to provide the ride.

Backing up a bit, I’m probably one of the harshest critics of marketing creative within several hundred miles of Atlanta. That’s because I grew up in the industry. Case in point: Friends over for football. Come commercial break, everyone finds a reason to get up and leave, to get something to eat or take a “bio break.” I’m the one who stays. This is probably because every spot takes me back to my ad agency days, when my writer partner and I sweated over a creative brief, put our hearts and souls into a concept, storyboarded it and then, presenting it to the layers and layers of agency and client-side decision-makers, hoped it would actually become a commercial. Sometimes, those concepts made the air, more often than not however, they contributed to my “file” of commercial ideas that never saw the light of day… a pile of 20 x 30 foam core boards in the corner of my office.

So, what is this campaign of commercials that I enjoyed (and appreciated for both its creative and strategic brilliance) so much that I felt compelled to write about it? It’s a campaign created on behalf of Mass Mutual. If you haven’t seen it, please click on the link and check it out: thirty-second spot for Mass Mutual. In it, the parents of a Little Leaguer “cheer him on” (sort of) while he’s at bat. I don’t want to give too much away here.  I’ll only tell you that the announcer comes in with just a few seconds remaining: “98% of kids won’t be getting an athletic scholarship,” he says. “Talk to us about college planning today. Feel comfortable about tomorrow.” Back to Maslow and his hierarchy of needs. Mass Mutual isn't just selling a college fund. After all, where's the high-level, emotional need in that? Instead, they’re selling the comfort, security, and peace of mind that comes with NOT having to rely on your child's athletic ability to pay for college. 

In a second commercial, the partner to this college planning spot, a couple ponders the question: Which one of our children will take care of us in our old age? The answer, which they discover by observing their children at play, is a bit concerning. According to the announcer, “55% of parents expect financial assistance from their kids during retirement years. Talk to us about retirement today and feel comfortable about tomorrow.” Should you rely on your kids to take care of you as you get older? Probably not.

This is what we, as an industry, need to be doing. Don’t focus merely on what your products and services do, but what they mean, as well. This is a great example of what we talked about in that last blog.  You could say that a checking account meets the need of having to pay bills from a distance. Or, that a savings account is a way to put money where you won’t be tempted to spend it. Instead, we need to talk about how these products meet those “higher” needs, such as comfort, security, and peace of mind.  Mass Mutual does this beautifully, in a message that blends humor with just enough discomfort.  

Again, that’s why we do what we do here at Bank Marketing Center. We apply the art and science of messaging to help you to get the absolute most out of your marketing dollars.

About Bank Marketing Center

Here at BankMarketingCenter.com, our goal is to help you with that vital, topical, and compelling communication with customers; messaging that will help you build trust, relationships, and revenue. In short, build your brand. To view our campaigns, both print and digital, visit BankMarketingCenter.com. Or, you can contact me directly by phone at 678-528-6688 or email at nreynolds@bankmarketingcenter.com. As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on this subject.

“Early in the pandemic,” says American Banker in their recent article, “In the war for talent, bank employees gain upper hand,” “early in the pandemic, the number of job openings at Zions Bancorp. plummeted to less than 200. A year later, the Salt Lake City company has three times as many positions available. Zions is offering certain perks to new employees, including signing bonuses for select positions and the opportunity to enroll in benefits immediately, instead of waiting the standard 30 days. But sometimes those enticements aren’t enough.”

Of course, they aren’t enough. After all, we’re now living in the era of The Great Resignation. By now, you’ve probably heard the term.  If you haven’t, it was first coined in 2019 by Anthony Klotz, a professor of management at Mays Business School of Texas A&M University.  Klotz defines The Great Resignation as “the mass, voluntary exodus from the workforce” which we’ve experienced over the last two years or so.

In their article, “Overwhelming number of Businesses Report Difficulty Hiring Workers and Retaining Existing Employees:” US News & World Report speaks to what the Great Resignation has meant for businesses. “Large U.S. companies” it says, “are finding it increasingly difficult to hire qualified workers while also struggling to retain their existing employees. Citing an April, 2021 survey by the Conference Board, the article goes onto say that “more than 230 human resource executives echoed reports of labor shortages across the economy as businesses and other establishments that had shut down or were otherwise restricted by the coronavirus pandemic rapidly reopen.”

Not only is recruitment an uphill battle, but so is retention. A recent Gallup study found that 48 percent of employees are actively searching for new opportunities. The truth is, the pandemic merely fast-tracked a problem that has been percolating in American business since Henry Ford’s first Model T rolled off an assembly line. What the pandemic did was create an environment where workers who have long felt unappreciated, unengaged, and under compensated could actually act upon those feelings and leave. And between just April and June of last year, over 12 million did.

What’s a bank to do?  Recright, a Helsinki-based firm specializing in recruitment and retention, has the right idea:  Employer Branding.  What is Employer Branding?  “It’s the process of positioning your company as the employer of choice to a target group of potential candidates.”

Jill Castilla, President and CEO, Citizens Bank of Edmond, summed it up pretty nicely in a recent LinkedIn post:

“How in the world does a 1 location, $350 million community bank with 55 team members in suburban Oklahoma City end up on American Banker's 25 Most Powerful Women in Banking list? It's the team! It's the culture! It's the community! It’s the legacy! Culture change is hard. Driving change, encouraging high performance and rooting out negativity, unethical behavior and fixed mentalities should be so much easier. Standing out and being a little different can draw as much criticism as it does praise and it's so easy to let the critics get you down. Our team's focus to not only lead our bank and our community, but to also lead our industry into the next 100 years inspires me every single day. If you like to do big, impactful and sustaining work, Citizens Bank of Edmond should be your partner, your bank, your employer.”

Back to “employer branding.”  This is what it’s all about. If your bank is that employer that inspires, encourages high performance, and roots out negativity, unethical behavior, and fixed mentalities, you need to climb up to the nearest mountaintop and shout it out. If there’s no mountaintop nearby or you’re afraid of heights, you can always get that message out through branded messaging. Toot your own horn a bit, it’s okay. Be the brand that attracts the best and then work hard to get that message out there.  You’ll find that you’ll spend a lot less time looking for top talent… because that talent will be coming to you.

About Bank Marketing Center

Here at BankMarketingCenter.com, our goal is to help you with that vital, topical, and compelling communication with customers; messaging that will help you build trust, relationships, and revenue. In short, build your brand. To view our campaigns, both print and digital, visit BankMarketingCenter.com. Or, you can contact me directly by phone at 678-528-6688 or email at nreynolds@bankmarketingcenter.com. As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on this subject.

All the talk these days seems to be about digital transformation and offering a personalized digital banking experience. Or, on the in-branch side, the need to offer the kind of personalized, financial guidance that people simply won’t find with non-traditional institutions, such as digital only banks. It seems to be all about services; that the only way to win and keep customers is by offering them products and services that are better than the competitor’s. Which, as a former ad guy, leads me to ask this question: What happened to branding? 

To answer it, I invite you to take a time-machine spin back to 1985-86, which was the height of what was then called “the cola wars.” The warring factions? Coca-Cola USA and PepsiCo. Coke and Pepsi were at the time, and I believe the same holds true today, within a point or two of each other in terms of market share. The soft drink market, at the time, was a $26 billion market, and the two giants battled it out by spending hundreds of millions of dollars, largely on television. If you’re too young to remember, it was kind of fun to watch. Brand image campaigns were supplemented by “taste test” commercials. Oddly, but not surprisingly, both sides claimed to win these taste tests, which only added to the fun… and confusion.

Back then, Coke’s brand position was “Always Coca-Cola” while Pepsi went with “The Choice of a New Generation.” Coke watched as Pepsi, making use of superstar athletes, actors, and musicians as endorsers, began to grab that much-coveted target audience; the pre-teens who were “transitioning” from juice drinks to soft drinks.  You see, it was (and still is) common knowledge among those in the soft drink biz that cola drinkers are some of the most brand loyal on the planet. So, winning that pre-teen was (and still is) critical to a soft drink’s success.

As Pepsi earned the loyalty of these just-starting-to-drink-cola youngsters, the folks at Coca-Cola, of course, began to panic. Their solution? To develop and market a product that could better compete with Pepsi. Makes sense, right?  What happened afterward, however, didn’t. The decision was made to take the current Coke product off the market and replace it with this new product; one that, with a re-formulation, would taste more like Pepsi… less carbonation with a bit more sweetness. This “new” coke would be called “New Coke,” a cola that would hopefully appeal to the younger market by offering them “the great taste of Coca-Cola with the sweetness of Pepsi.” Unfortunately, Coca-Cola was somehow ignoring another critical market: Their current, brand loyal customers.

On July 20, 1986, the New York Times published an article entitled, “Keeping New Coke Alive.”  The article described just how difficult a time Coca-Cola was having with the new product.  At the time, McDonald's, along with Denny's, "several other fountain customers," and many of Coca-Cola's bottlers wanted nothing to do with New Coke. Coca-Cola Classic, the new name for the old cola that New Coke was supposed to replace had, in less than two years since New Coke's launch, outsold New Coke by a margin of more than 4 to 1. Ironically, the brand that Coca-Cola had sought to shelve saw record sales and profits with the New Coke launch with revenues climbing almost 20%.

So, why do I think that this anecdote is relevant to today’s discussion about services, digital transformation, AI-driven user experiences, etc.? Because what those of us in the banking industry need to remember is that while the products and services we offer are important, so is building and supporting the brand.

Fast forward to the present day. Marketing pundits now frame it this way: “No one cares what you do. They’re only interested in why you do it.” A superior digital experience is important, and so is in-branch financial advice, but consumers consider more than just features when choosing a brand. In the ABA Journal article, “What are you doing about customer loyalty?” author Phil Seward had this to say: “In the digital age, financial services providers have seen the industry drastically change due to an increase in competition from non-financial institutions. Technology organizations are embedded in consumers’ daily lives, and pride themselves on putting the customer experience first and foremost. This expectation of an enhanced customer experience has made it harder for traditional banks to break through the noise and remain top of mind, putting them at risk of losing customers. Building brand loyalty can be a powerful way to influence customer behavior and enhance the bottom line.”

Look at Coca-Cola. The company had created such powerful brand loyalty for Coca-Cola Classic that when they tried to replace it with something new and improved, Classic came back stronger than ever. Classic's brand was so strong, that New Coke never had a chance and taste wasn't even a consideration; it was all about a brand with fans, a brand that, nearly a century old, people knew and loved.

So, what can banks learn from the cola wars?  Know, and love, your audience. Build your brand around these individuals. Supplement your product/service messaging with consistent messaging that reinforces “why you are,” instead of what you do.  Constantly remind your customers how important they are to you. Build a strong brand by building strong relationships. Do this and, like Coca-Cola Classic, your brand will be well prepared to defend itself from any attack.

About Bank Marketing Center

Here at BankMarketingCenter.com, our goal is to help you with that vital, topical, and compelling communication with customers; messaging that will help you build trust, relationships, and revenue. In short, build your brand. To view our campaigns, both print and digital, visit bankmarketingcenter.com. Or, you can contact me directly by phone at 678-528-6688 or email at nreynolds@bankmarketingcenter.com. As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on this subject.

The CEO of Chime, the U.S. technology neobank company that provides fee-free financial services through a mobile app, just a week or so ago had this to say about traditional banks in an article on cnbc.com: “COVID-19 and the pandemic have just accelerated the trend that was already in motion. There’s an increasing willingness to provide and manage your finances through a mobile app. Particularly for the younger generation, the notion of going in to fill out forms, to get basic financial services is really becoming a relic of the past.”

Which begs the question, if you’re a community bank, what will your community look like in the not-too-distant future?

 By that I mean, is the online community all that’s left for banks? Individuals who seem willing to trade personal data for convenience? Those who would prefer to never consult with a human being, an expert, when it comes to managing one of the most important and difficult areas of their lives? Their finances?

Personally, I believe there is still a place for that “off-line” community… the one surrounding your branch locations, the one that consists of individuals and local businesses who are connected with each other and value that connection.

But, hey, what do I know?  Seems like every time you open a news page in your browser there’s some article about digital transformation, monetizing data, turning branch banks into internet cafes… is that really where we’re headed?  And, should we?

Granted, I wholeheartedly agree with Mr. Britt, Chine CEO, that “the pandemic has just accelerated the trend that was already in motion.”  This finextra article from just the other day included this proclamation from Paul Walker, GM of Q2 BaaS. “Now any bank can have its own Marcus or Chime in a matter of a few weeks.”  Wow, the race to trade one community for the other is really is running full steam ahead.

Further proof is a recent Financial Brand blog about digital banking insights that can be learned from China’s We Bank. The Shenzen-based, digital-only bank has experienced exponential growth since its inception in 2015. How? The cynic might ask this question: Could it be that they are raking in cash not because of a digital banking model worth emulating but, instead, a model that allows them to monetize data and loan money to high-risk individuals without fear of running afoul of regulatory agencies?

Case in point. We Bank has built a business of over 200 million customers by opening accounts with an average revenue per user of around $10 USD.  Their per-account operation cost is only 3.6 RMB, or roughly $.50 USD. And, they can process a loan application in just 5 seconds.  5 seconds!  How is that possible?  Henry Ma, CIO explains it so: “We work with a lot of internet platforms. Essentially, we embed our financial products into our partner platforms. And we also work with our partner platforms and leverage the data and the user base that they have and do a lot of pre-underwriting on the users. When we work with a particular platform, the user will get pre-underwritten and receive an invitation from us. Once the user accepts the invitation, we have already gotten some idea of what kind of a credit worthiness this user deserves.”

“We leverage the data and the user base and do a lot of pre-underwriting…”  Hmmm.  Where does this data to which Mr. Ma refers come from?  Sounds to me a like it might be Big Brother Banking, where your bank, in bed with Big Data Bad Boy, knows everything about you and then uses that information to sell their products (which of course, are products that create the revenue they didn’t generate when they sucked you in with a bait-and-switch offer.)

If this sounds a bit skeptical and cynical that’s because, frankly, it is.

Back to the original point here.  What “community” are digital banks serving and do our true, traditional, local community banks want to go there? The pandemic may have accelerated the digital banking trend, but that doesn’t necessarily signal progress or a direction in which banks need to necessarily go. People need community and connections. Yes, they want convenience, but once this pandemic is behind us, will those digital customers still feel the same way? Perhaps, but perhaps not. I could see the pendulum swinging back the other way with a re-birth of the branch bank. 

And why not?  E-tailers are doing it.  In “Why are Online Retailers adding Brick and Mortar Stores?” DeFi Nucleus Vision says, “Online shopping lacks human interactions. Customers don’t get a chance to ask in-store stylists for advice, it’s a solitary experience and customizations aren’t as easy to organize. Having a salesperson who greets you, tells you what looks good on you, gives you the right size, and offers a better color scheme can help brands build a deeper connection with the customer.”  A “deeper connection.” That sounds a lot like community banking to me.

About Bank Marketing Center

Here at BankMarketingCenter.com, our goal is to help you with that vital, topical, and compelling communication with customers; messaging that will help you build trust, relationships, and with them, your brand.

To view our marketing creative, both print and digital – ranging from product and brand ads to in-branch brochures and signage, visit bankmarketingcenter.com.  Or, you can contact me directly by phone at 678-528-6688 or email at nreynolds@bankmarketingcenter.com.  As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on this subject.