Branding should drive your CU’s strategic dialogue.
By Nav Khanna, CSME, CCE, CIE
“Never compromise your brand.” This was one of the first things Mark Weber told my cohort at CUES School of Strategic Marketing l back in 2014. Weber is the founder of Weber Marketing Group (a CUES Supplier member based in Seattle). At that time, my role as head of strategy and innovation at $2.4 billion Travis Credit Union, Vacaville, Calif., was still a new one, with marketing one of my responsibilities. Over the course of the school, I realized that the marketing team needed to play a bigger role in staff training and cultural adaptation to our brand—and be deeply involved in strategy creation and execution. In the past, marketing had not taken the strategic lead at the credit union. Instead, consumer and commercial lending, wealth management, card products, deposit products, insurance products and the like drove the dialogue and dictated the marketing priorities. At CUES School of Strategic Marketing I and CUES School of Strategic Marketing II (each a two-day event in the same week), the instructors posed questions that aided my thinking, including:
- Do you have purpose and is your team aligned with that purpose?
- Do you have compelling brand values, i.e., do your brand attributes and promise drive the way you treat your members?
- Are your employees trained and committed to living your brand?
- Are you measuring your brand awareness and how high your credit union is on members’ top-of-mind market share list?
- Is your brand experience disconnected across channels?
The schools also explored how deep member understanding is a vital component in effective branding, and transforming data into usable knowledge is the key to leveraging targeted opportunities. One instructor said, “IT might own the data, but marketing owns the answers.” Great retailers harness information about lifestyle, behavior and passion (think Amazon). As the strategic marketers/branders leading our CUs’ charges, we must be effective at leveraging this data to create value-based relationships with our members. Then, we must figure out how to deploy this deep member knowledge effectively over digital interfaces and transforming branches. We were assigned a project between the two years of the school. I did a brand articulation market research assessment. As a result of my project, Travis CU now has a clearly documented and shared understanding of our brand culture, personality, promise, values, elements, targets and essence. Thus, our credit union has the answers to the questions I mentioned at the beginning of this blog. I am still excited to be moving forward with our strategic marketing and branding focus. CUES member Nav Khanna, CSME, CCE, CIE, is EVP/strategy and innovation at $2.4 billion Travis Credit Union, Vacaville, Calif.. Help your credit union learn how to put the strategy in marketing at CUES School of Strategic Marketing l and CUES School of Strategic Marketing II in July in Seattle.
