Do Your Members Trust You? (I Bet They Do.)

Posted by Ron Jooss

Credit unions continue to get more positive national media attention. Yesterday on CBS Sunday Morning, Suze Orman pretty much told the country to switch their credit cards to credit unions. I’ve already waved my freak flag once about the opportunities all this positive press presents. But a recently issued report offers another, related opportunity for credit unions. The 2010 Edelman Trust Barometer reports that consumer trust in banks has plummeted in the past two years. No major surprise there, one would guess.

The executive summary I linked to above has lots of graphs and additional info if you’re interested, but here I offer one telling quote from the study: Since 2007, trust in banks has dramatically declined in most Western countries. In the U.S., this decline is steepest, with banks losing 39 points in three years.” When asked the question, “How much do you trust the following industry to do what is right?,” only 29 percent of consumers age 35 to 64 answered positively (that is, within the 6-9 range on a 1-9 scale).  

My intention here isn’t to pile on banks and I’m not an expert on consumer trends, but my guess is that this creates a market opportunity for credit unions: a wave of positive media attention for credit unions, data that confirms consumers are shaky at best as bank customers.

The Edelman study—obviously—implies that the word “trust” carries plenty of emotional weight with consumers. If you credit union strategic planners and marketers out there were to ask yourselves, “Do our members trust us?” I bet nearly all of you could answer affirmatively. Natural person credit unions aren’t without their problems today, but trustworthiness isn’t one of them. I bet any ad campaign built around the simple member testimonial, “I trust my credit union,” would give every couch potato or radio listener like me reason to remember who you are. Better yet, make a promise that switching to your credit union is easy--and make it so. 

There’s a television advertisement I seem to see every time I turn on the TV—our DVR is filled with American Idol episodes—that asks, (I’m paraphrasing) “Are we going to remember this time as the great recession or the recession that made us great?” It’s easy to get carried away with this type of oversimplified, fast-food philosophy, but there is no question that the current economic climate, as dismal as it has been for so many of us, has provided many credit unions with a golden opportunity. Let’s hope they won’t someday remember it as an opportunity lost.