If you haven’t yet seen the Kmart “Ship My Pants” video that became a viral internet sensation last week, you are among the few in the social media realm. In just a week, the video has had over 14.4 million views through thousands of shares, tweets, posts, emails and more.
It took guts on Kmart’s part to engage in humor that critics have dubbed immature and crude, but I think it was a smart move. Up until the "Ship My Pants" spot, the second-highest number of views on their YouTube channel tops just over 60,000.
My previous blog post about passion and storytelling is seemingly unrelated to this post at first glance. However, what Kmart has done here is told a story through appealing to people’s emotions. In this case, it was humor. I mean, how exciting can it be to buy a pair of pants online and have them shipped to your house? But, make it funny, and guess which company is going to be next in line when someone needs a pair of khakis? I’m just saying.
Credit unions, there are a couple of lessons to be learned here:
1. Depositing checks, transferring money, and doing about anything related to banking is boring to consumers, and they see it as a checkmark on their list of things to do. But if you can tie that errand to the emotions associated with transfers, loans, checking or savings accounts, then you can gain traction by breaking through the noise.
Once you’ve done that, you can then start to build actual relationships by communicating with your target audience and showing them the human side of our very transactional-based business. That’s how to gain followers and build your brand awareness.
2. Playing it safe in your marketing efforts and not taking any risks because you are afraid of making this person mad, or not appealing to that person, is not the way successful marketing happens in this day and age of social media and thousands of marketing messages per day. And, in many cases, it means not trying to appeal to a certain group means not appealing to any group.
I’m not condoning distasteful advertising, but there is an opportunity for credit unions to stand apart from other financial institutions. We all know why we do – it’s because we are awesome at taking care of members’ financial needs and the communities we serve. We just need to get better at telling our story and shipping our pants in our own special credit union way.
Amanda
MarketMatch solves business problems for credit unions and banks through marketing by providing FOCUS, generating MOMENTUM, and creating measurable RESULTS.
Contact me to learn how MarketMatch can help you with your marketing efforts, whether it is through marketing strategy, branding or rebranding, budget planning, new product development, and much more. Learn more about all of our client services by clicking here.
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