Credit Union Branding
Your brand reputation should make your Mom proud.
The life lessons your Mom imparted hold as true for brand reputation as they do for you, which means you need to share her wisdom with everyone. Wait a minute, what’s my Mom got to do with our brand? Your Mom wanted you to grow up to be happy and healthy, with plenty of friends…
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Your vague and squishy brand is hurting membership
A vague and squishy brand makes it almost impossible for a credit union to bring in new members. Without a solid reason to notice or care, no one other than your most involved members will know who you are, or what makes you different. Yes, it probably doesn’t help that the generic tagline next to your credit union logo would probably…
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Unintended consequences can be damaging
When Marketers don’t pay enough attention, unintended consequences can be especially damaging. If you don’t believe me, look at the public relations fiasco United Airlines has been experiencing lately. Those standardized terms probably looked reasonable to those in charge of herding passengers at United, especially since all the major airlines use similar wording in the fine print that accompany ticket sales.…
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Most of the world has no idea who you are.
Credit unions, I hate to be the one to break this to you, but most of the world has no idea who you are. That may be a surprise to you since you live in the CUniverse. When immersed in the credit union culture, when you deal with the same coworkers and members most of the time, it’s too easy to…
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Choose to be worth it.
They say that in the race to the bottom only one person wins, but I’m not convinced that anyone actually does. We still see credit unions claiming they “do everything a bank does, only cheaper.” Okay, they don’t normally say “cheaper” in their marketing, but they do usually brag about their lower loan / higher savings rates. They also…
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If Big Blue can pivot, so can you.
When asked to think of an agile, design-focused business, Apple or maybe Tesla probably come to mind. IBM probably won’t – but maybe they should. Having invented everything from mag stripe cards and the ATM, to floppy disks and disk drives, UPC barcodes and SQL programming, IBM has been the prototype Big American Corporation almost since it…
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Rebranding: partial polish or total transformation?
Once the Board is on board with rebranding, the question soon becomes “how far should we take it?” For some, a rebranding should be more about refinement than reinvention, a partial polish over a total transformation. Others would prefer the more extreme approach, looking for a new name and a new beginning in order to create something fresh and amazing. How do you…
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Rebranding: throwing Baby out with the bathwater?
Rebranding is all about getting to the core of who you are. When you strip away all the products, branches and systems, the underlying purpose, heart and soul of the credit union is an optimist’s belief in people helping other people, making the world a better place. There is an emotional connection there that other businesses just…
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What ad agencies and credit unions have in common
Ad agencies have a real problem; they don’t like being called ad agencies. For most of the people working in the industry today that term should have been left behind, maybe as far back as in the ’60’s (especially once it was overly-romanticized by the TV series “Mad Men”). But if nothing else, that show has shown the enormous changes…
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It’s hard to read the label from inside the jar.
It’s obvious you’re different. You have the best staff, the best products, the best rates, and no one else is so completely devoted to their members. Absolutely no one can compare to you, and, frankly, you should have members willing to pay extra just to get in. Of course, you’re on the inside, looking out. When everyone else reads…
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