What's Your Promise?

“We must not promise what we ought not, lest we be called on to perform what we cannot.”  -Abraham Lincoln 

A brand promise is the expectation you’ve given your members and communities.  It is your legacy and your differentiator over your competitors.  It is the basis of peoples’ decisions to buy with you. 

Your brand promise should stand the test of time no matter what products you offer, what communities you serve, and the goals you have for your financial institution.  Hence it needs to be simple, yet aspirational, and most importantly, something you can deliver on no matter what.

After all, it’s not the making of the promise that is important, is the keeping of that promise. 

How do you go about coming up with the one big thing that you want to promise and can deliver on no matter what?  Here’s how:

1. Listen to the buzz.  Figure out what your members and customers really think about you.  This is NOT your perception about what people are thinking and saying about you.  We often make a big mistake in assuming more people know about our credit union or bank than actually do.  Moreover, we assume we know how they view us.  But there is no better way than to ask.  Ask your staff members, board members, current members and people in the community what they think about your financial institution.  Also do searches on sites like Yelp, Foursquare, and other social media sites to gauge the honest feedback and reviews people are posting about your credit union or bank.
2. What do you stand for?  Working together as a team to determine your short and long term goals and making sure that those goals align with the foundation of your business is key in being able to live up to your promise to customers and members.  Is it to make banking fun, easy, or efficient?  Or perhaps having the lowest fees?  Price alone is hard to stand on, and determining the "why" of your organization takes some time, but the promise you end up making should be pointing directly toward this target.
3. Do a SWOT analysis.  What are your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats as an organization?  Having a candid discussion with your team about all of these areas will be beneficial as you enumerate and discover differentiators for your financial institution. 
4. What is your brand’s personality?  What attributes does your credit union or bank exemplify through the course of doing business with customers and members?  These attributes will help you determine the kind of promise you will make and how you will deliver on that promise over time.  “A brand personality is an expression of a brand, described and experienced as human personality traits e.g. friendly, intelligent, innovative, etc.  It is an expression of the relationship between the consumer and the brand.”  (Source: www.esomar.org).

It’s all about values.  

Core values and brand values are two ways of saying the same thing, but having these foundational values in place that guide every decision you make as an organization is very important because it gives your employees and members and the community something real to believe in other than products or services.

Some great examples of core values can be found at the following companies: Southwest Airlines, Ritz Carlton,Whole Foods Market, and Zappos.com.  What makes these examples great, however, aren’t the words written on those pages or in their respective break rooms.  It is the lengths to which these companies go in their everyday businesses in order to fulfill these values that makes them so special. 

Having a brand promise can seem like such a little thing when you have to worry about how your financial institution is going to keep growing in this heavily competitive and regulated industry.  But it is one of the most important things your business can do for sustainability in the future.  It comes with many benefits:

• Employee loyalty.  Enumerating the things listed above gives your employees a “why” for coming to work for your company.  When they buy into the vision and mission, they are investing themselves in you just as you have invested in them. 
• Greater brand awareness.  Having these many facets of your brand defined gives you more bandwidth to do some really special stuff with your marketing and branding efforts.  Put together a brand communication plan for both inside your financial institution and outside.  Communicating the different elements of your brand at every opportunity with employees and customers will yield greater brand awareness for everyone. 
• Knowing exactly who is best suited for your institution.  If you are always targeting different groups for different campaigns, or find yourself asking “who is our best target market,” focusing on the elements of your brand – including your brand promise – will help you determine the customers and members for whom you are able to serve perfectly. 
• Organizational alignment.  This is the “utopia” we all strive for in business; ensuring that everyone in your organization - from the tellers to the back office staff to the board members – is on the same page with the same end game in mind.  Having a well-structured brand is the foundation for alignment across your organization. 

While it is important to be focusing on the metrics that measure the growth and progress of your credit union or bank, not focusing on your brand as well can become an enormous liability on your balance sheet.  At the end of the day, what is your promise?

Amanda

Let MarketMatch help you harness the power of your brand to impact your bottom line.  Our proprietary branding process will target opportunities to obtain new customer relationships, grow existing customer relationships, and build brand awareness. Contact me for details.

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The Mystery of Bleach, Brand Loyalty, and The Latino Story

Spring is here and cleaning is in the minds of many. For years I have heard that bleach is an important cleansing agent in Hispanic households.  When visiting Latino households I regularly smell bleach in the kitchens and bathrooms.  

Using data from Experian Marketing Services’ Simmons National Hispanic Consumer Study that was collected in the twelve months ending on November 20, 2012, I found that 87% of Hispanic adults live in households that use bleach while only 82% of non-Hispanic adults live in households that use bleach. That represents an index of 105 for Latinos compared with an index of 99 for non-Latinos.

Interestingly, then, the attitudes expressed by Hispanics during my many years of doing research seem to be reflected in quantitative data. Bleach is an important part of the cleaning and disinfecting routine of Hispanics, and to a larger extent than anyone else.

Also, we all have heard about how brand loyal Latinos are. Because of a weak economy and other factors I suspected that private label and less expensive products would be most popular at this time. To my surprise Clorox is the brand of bleach most likely to be used by Latinos, even though it is a more premium brand. The following chart reports the brands used “most often” in Hispanic and non-Hispanic households.

Clearly, brand loyalty is alive and well among Latinos.  How else would one explain that Clorox bleach is their preferred brand? When doing qualitative research with Hispanics I frequently hear comments regarding the importance of staying with brands that have shown their efficacy over time.  In particular, Hispanics seem to be more brand loyal when it comes to products that are more central to the wellbeing of their families. This is good news for the Clorox company and an interesting challenge to alternative bleach manufacturers. This is a category where there is ample opportunity to grow among Hispanics.

Clorox 2 is a different type of product as it is not an oxidant, instead of bleach it uses oxygen as a cleaning agent. Interestingly, this product does not do as well among Hispanics, at least not yet.

At any rate, the story told here serves as a brand loyalty case study and a reminder of the value of cleanliness that Latinos hold dear. This also serves as a reminder that cultural values for product usage can be very powerful in determining consumer behavior.

The data used here is from Experian Marketing Services’ Simmons National Hispanic Consumer Study and was collected from October 24, 2011 to November, 2012. The sample of Hispanics contains 8,521 individuals and the non-Hispanic sample has 17,043 people.