The Word of Mouth Marketing Association recently released a great info graphic called The Word and the World of Customers:  Word of Mouth Marketing Offline and Online.  Embedded in this nicely designed infographic is a wealth of interesting tidbits that bank and credit union branding and marketing folks will find useful.

For many years, you have heard us at CBC talk about our principles of bank branding. You’ve seen us evangelize word of mouth marketing, highly targeted brand strategies, and unique thinking about a bank’s business model. In other words, we’ve always been a coach, helping our clients implement innovative strategies.

Today, we become not only the coach, but the client as well.

We are really excited to share with you something we’ve been working on for a while. We decided it was time to complement our bank consulting work by demonstrating how a bank could truly use all of the advice and brand strategies we believe so strongly in.

We are pleased to introduce you to Tribed: Banking Experiences for Niche Communities.  Tribed plans to develop an extensive series of small, highly targeted online-only ‘direct’ banks. Why? Because we want to make financial services more relevant to consumers. Our plan is to do this by providing banking member experiences that are tailored to extremely narrowly defined member segments, who share in a particular passion (“tribes”).

As the first example of this concept, today we’ve also launched Wag, a new website aimed at the most avid dog fanatics, at www.dog-bank.com. The website is currently an online publication providing unique content about how personal finance topics intersect with and impact the lifestyle of the fanatical dog lover, and facilitating discussion with community members about these topics.  Ultimately, we plan for Wag’s website to offer complete direct banking services to community members.

I hope you’ll take a few moments to poke around our sites and learn more about our concept. If you have questions, comments, etc., please be sure to share them. You can drop Jeff a line at j@niche-banking.com.

In the world of marketing folks, the phrase “brand consistency” is tossed around. A lot. And as you likely know, it’s usually used to describe things like making sure the PMS colors are the same on all materials. Telling people not to reshape the logo file, and to use the right type faces on certain documents. Making sure people don’t create rogue materials at their branches, that don’t match with what the corporate marketing department churned out.

That’s all well and good. But I’d like to see the conversation shift to a more important and meaningful focus: brand congruency.

Here’s my definition of “brand congruency“: when all the elements and touch points of your brand feel like they were cut from the same cloth.

So how are brand consistency and brand congruency related?

Brand consistency can assist in brand congruency…but cannot achieve brand congruency alone. Brand congruency happens when everything–EVERYTHING–is “on-brand.” When every touch point has been crafted lovingly from a strong, committed bank or credit union brand strategy. When everything you experience from the brand, whether it was created at a branch, by corporate, or an agency, shares the same voice.

Brand consistency is overly simplistic; it’s cosmetic. It says “as long as you followed the graphic standards manual, that’s all that matters,” rather than saying “what’s most important is making sure everything we do feels like it came from the same family.”

Congruency builds strong, experiential financial brands that people can connect with. Consistency alone creates uniform-but-shallow brand marketings.

If you missed the webinar, Brand Engagement: The Holy Grail for Banks and Credit Unions from March 30, 2011, there’s good news: the webinar is available for you to play on-demand thanks to Slideshare. You can listen and watch complete audio and video of the webinar right here.

In “Brand Engagement: The Holy Grail for Banks and Credit Unions” you’ll learn:

• What defines brand engagement
• How it impacts customers, members and employees alike
• Why it is so important
• The benefits it delivers
• How you begin creating it (overview)

Be sure to keep an eye on our Webinars page to learn about upcoming events you can register for.

Apathy = low brand engagement. And apathy about banking brands (including credit unions, of course) is everywhere. All the time. It’s rampant. Find 20 people and I’ll show you 17 who are absolutely indifferent about their financial services provider.

[They may say "yes I'd recommend my bank to a friend," but of course what they mean is "if my friend asked me where I bank, I'd tell them," not "I'd proactively try to recruit my friend to my bank." (More on proactive bank/credit union word of mouth here)]

Why are people apathetic about banking brands? People are apathetic about any brand–whether in the banking industry or not–that is not a tool for helping them shape their identity. As we once discussed at The Financial Brand, brands are tools for consumers to use to define themselves.  In other words, a brand is of no use to me unless it helps me:

• demonstrate what I stand for
• show what I stand against
• reflect my personality
• and otherwise tell you how I want you to think of me

Apathy happens when someone can tell a friend “I am an Acme Community Bank person,” and the statement is met with a blank, expressionless face, as if to say “um, okay, what’s your point?”

Take a strong brand by comparison. When a friend says “I’m an Apple girl,” that tells you something about her. When your new neighbor says “I’m a Harley guy,” that tells you a lot about him. When they say “I’m a Whole Foods kinda person,” that too tells you much about them.

The Conclusion: YOUR strong brand should THEM say a lot about themselves.

What are you gonna do about that?

Does it?

At CBC, we are known for talking about Finding the Story. Notice the word choice: find. Not “invent” or “create.” For banks and credit unions, the story already exists–it just needs to be uncovered and re-discovered.

Many will likely (hopefully) disagree with this, but we strongly believe:

Engaging brands are NOT built by conducting market research and trying to cater to what the market wants.

(This may be a valid way to uncover unmet needs and business opportunities…but it’s not a good way to build your brand.)

Instead, the most engaging brands are built through introspection…when companies look inward deeply, and come to an amazing level of clarity about who they really are. Once they have that clarity, then they embrace that identity without second-guessing whether the market will like them. Humans like authenticity. We can tell when a person is not being themselves, and we can tell when a company is trying too hard to be what they think we want them to be. It never works.

If you’re trying to develop a stronger, more engaging brand, here’s what we recommend: cancel your customer and non-constomer focus groups. Instead, invest that time in a series of conversations with your staff members, and dig deep. Get to know yourself as a company better than you ever thought possible. If you need help, let us know. But look inward, not outward.

This week, the Credit Union Times published a great article about the important topic of brand engagement, titled Engagement: One Size Doesn’t Fit All. The article featured key insights and commentary by our own Jeff Stephens, as well as Brady Walen of CBC partner firm Market Insights. Author Myriam Digiovanni nicely capturing the key points about why brand engagement is so important to credit unions, and how it can be accomplished.

Please take a moment to read the entire article.

On a Related Note: Free Brand Engagement Webinar on March 30, 2011

Assuming the topic of brand engagement for banks and credit unions piques your interest (you’re reading this blog, after all!), you may want to consider registering for our upcoming webinar, Brand Engagement: The Holy Grail for Banks and Credit Unions. Learn more and register today.

We’re excited to announce our upcoming webinar, “Brand Engagement: The Holy Grail for Banks and Credit Unions,” scheduled for March 30, 2011 at 10 am Pacific.

Overview: Brand engagement is the missing link for most banks and credit unions, preventing them achieving the success they are capable of. While certain companies in other industries have cracked the code of brand engagement, it has yet to be conquered in financial services. Attend this webinar and you’ll begin to understand how to evolve your company away from commoditization by increasing brand engagement.

In “Brand Engagement: The Holy Grail for Banks and Credit Unions” you’ll learn:
▪ What defines brand engagement
▪ How it impacts customers, members and employees alike
▪ Why it is so important
▪ The benefits it delivers
▪ How you begin creating it (overview)

Details
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
10 am PST
45 minutes + 15 minutes Q&A
Who Should Attend: Presidents, CEOs, Directors of Marketing
Cost: Free. To register, email webinars@creative-brand.com

Grab a group of bank or credit union CEO’s and executives and ask them what they believe makes them different, and you’ll get a lot of impassioned, emphatic (and sincere) rhetoric about customer/member service, great people and commitment to the community.  And what you quickly find is that what makes each of these banks and credit unions different…is also what makes them the same.

We’re proposing a new, more important question:

How is your business strategy divergent?

This is entirely different question. Let’s quickly examine:

Business Strategy:

In this case, we’re not asking how your brand is different. Instead, we are asking how your entire business model differs. How do you make money differently? How do you service customers differently? How do your structure your organization differently? As a result of these differences, how do your P&L and balance sheet look different than other banks and credit unions?  Or, instead of “different,” what we really mean is…

Divergent:

“Divergent” is much more drastic than “different.” When your strategy diverges, it’s–at least in some ways–radically different than the norm. It’s way out in left field. In revenue categories where others make lots of money, you make almost none; but where they make no money, you rake it in. Things typical financial institutions focus on, you could care less. Instead, you obsess mostly on things others do not even track.

Strive for a divergent business strategy. Then, you’re really innovating.

As a friend of mine likes to give me a hard time about constantly saying, “it’s all about brand engagement.” Yes, we really believe that. As banks and credit unions, we have to give people a reason to care about our brands, or we’re sunk.

An important question often arises: “can your brand be engaging to everyone?” The answer is ‘no.’ And, by the way, you don’t want it to be.

There is no generic definition of ‘engaging.’ Sure, dictionary.com offers a general definition of engaging, but that’s not what we mean. You see, here’s the key point:

Engagement is dependent on what matters to each individual audience member.

In other words, there is no brand that is engaging to every human with a pulse…because not every human shares the same things that matter to them. Consider the current kings of brand, like Apple or Nike. Engagement in those brands is definitely common and widespread, but it’s not 100% universal. Why? Because for some people, those brands simply don’t relate to who they are.

There are certainly examples of this in your own life. Here’s an example in mine (at the risk of being attacked by the masses): Star Wars is commonly considered a very engaging set of films. Yet they don’t hold my attention for two seconds; I could care less. It’s just not who I am. It’s not an engaging brand…to me.

“To me” is the important lesson, here.

Your bank or credit union’s brand is the same–it shouldn’t be built with the naive objective to have it be engaging to everyone. That can’t possibly happen anyway, and all it results in is a bland, diluted brand that is barely engaging to anyone. Instead, it should be built to connect strongly only with the type of people who value that brand.

You want your members and customers to say, “the ACME Financial brand is really awesome…to me, anyway. You might not like it though.”