Posted by Jeffry Pilcher, guest blogger
When trying to build a credit union brand, there are only two types of messages that matter: antes and drivers.
Antes. An ante is anything that is so important to your target audience that most of your competitors have it, too. These are the chips you must throw into the pot just to play in the financial space and there's a lot of them. As a credit union, you must be trustworthy. You must be accurate. Your target audience expects 100 percent accuracy. Fall short, and you've got a branding challenge.
A lot of financial institutions talk about antes, like free checking, but antes don't win the game. To build your brand, you need to concentrate on drivers.
Drivers. These are things that mean a lot to your members, that only your credit union can deliver. These are what really drive people's decisions, and what fuel strong financial brands. The trick is identifying the drivers behind your credit union's brand.
You can audit your credit union's brand and map it out on the grid below (click on the graphic to see it brighter):
The more important a message is to your target audience, the higher up the vertical axis it goes (relevance). Similarly, you plot the message further out on the horizontal axis as fewer and fewer competitors can also lay claim to it (distinction).
Things that are neither relevant to your target audience nor different from what anyone else has are called neutral messages. Aspects of your organization that may be very unique but have little relevance to your target audience are known as distinctions. Both neutrals and distinctions have such low relevance that they rarely drive brand decisions.
Reality check: Don't feel bad if you can't come up with a long list of drivers. Few organizations have that many. It can take a lot of work just to identify two or three, and even then they may be lofty goals.
Some things that may fall under the category of drivers include:
- paying member dividends annually;
- having a relationship pricing/rewards structure;
- offering a courier for pickup and deliveries;
- your local presence, local knowledge and local community involvement; and
- you were not involved in subprime lending.
Here are a few more examples to give you an idea of how they might map out.
- Deposits insured up to $100,000 -Ante. The fact that your deposits are insured by NCUA is hyper-critical to many members right now. Without a doubt, it's an important message to share these days, but almost every financial institution in America is insured by either the NCUA or FDIC, so it's not a very unique or distinct message. It may help retain business, but it isn't likely to drive business.
- Mobile banking - Distinction. Few financial institutions have it, so it's fairly unique. But does it seem to be driving much (if any) business? No. It hasn't yet proved to be that important to that many people. Someday, though, mobile banking could be an ante.
- Innovation - Distinction. You could be the most innovative financial institution around, but so what? Your target audience doesn't care. Your actual innovations may benefit them, but being innovative, by itself, is not important.
- Rewards checking - Driver, moving to ante. Those recently introduced checking accounts with super-high interest rates were once most definitely brand drivers. But with each day, high-interest checking accounts are becoming more commonplace. They are fast becoming antes.
Key takeaways: The most powerful messages you can use to build your brand are both highly relevant to your members and very distinct from your competitors. These are your brand drivers. Identify them and focus your brand around those.
It's OK to talk about antes (and even some distinctions from time to time) because they will hit the nerve of some segment in your target audience. Just don't talk about them all the time.
Never bother talking about neutral messages.
Jeffry Pilcher is president of ICONiQ and the chief blogger for The Financial Brand blog.
