Anyone who believes branch banking isn’t susceptible to obsolescence hasn’t been paying attention to the migration of renting movies from brick and mortar storefronts to kiosks and ultimately online only availability.
How long will it be before the last remaining Blockbuster store is closed – being replaced by the ubiquitous Red Box kiosks and ultimately Netflix?
This is Blog Post 1 of 2 on what Capital One will do to ING…enjoy.
I have five checking accounts right now at five different institutions. This is a hazard of working in the financial services industry and helping banks and CUs gain new customers. It’s also a byproduct of having shopped around for many years for a good fit in a PFI. While I have five checking accounts, several of which are used for basic transactions, my heart and my direct deposit lies with ING Direct. They are my Orange Crush, you might say!
(Editor’s note: This is another in a series of blog posts related to the training of financial institution employees. If appropriate, please pass this information to your training staff.)
Breaking people away from their jobs is an ever-increasing problem when it comes to training sessions. This is especially true for your frontline staff. I’ve worked in the financial services industry for over 25 years, and everywhere I go to train I see the time crunch as an ever-increasing problem. It’s understandable. We’re all trying to run as “lean and mean” as we can.
It’s possible that someday we’ll look back and realize that online-only banks were the beginning of the end of traditional banking – or at least of branch banking.
Perhaps we’ll realize that the rush to mobile banking was the second major event taking us in this direction.
The same morning I posted my ideas for promoting branch locations, an email told me one of our banking clients saw outstanding success from a very recent grand opening event.
The quote from the bank’s CEO was great: “Look at all these people.”
Members of the marketing team at the local credit union must be on a bad headline binge and are having a difficult time coming down from their high. Between yesterday and this morning I’ve encountered three new headlines being used for the credit union’s long-running low-rate auto loan campaign.
Yesterday while approaching the teller window I noticed a counter sign bearing the headline “quit stalling.” The visual was of a man walking down the middle of an empty highway in the middle of nowhere while holding a gas can. The campaign’s consistent subhead reads “Auto Loan Rates as low as 3.39% APR.”
Okay, some of you might feel that I’m guilty of beating this headline issue to death. But I don’t feel this way.
Bad headlines have become so pervasive that someone needs to get up on the soapbox and rant and rave about them until the guilty parties see the light and change their ways – if that’s possible.
I hope it is.
One day I drove along a route I seldom took and glanced toward a mini-mall along the street. I saw a big Going Out of Business sign in the window of a coffee and tea products specialty store. A store I hadn’t seen before. Since traffic was heavy, I was moving slow enough to turn into the parking lot.
While he was ringing up my purchase, the owner said, “Now that I’m going out of business, I’m making more sales than ever.”
I often spend hours researching and writing this blog but there’s no assurance that you’ll stop and read it. On the day it posts, you are assaulted by a constant stream of competing marketing messages and other visual and audio stimuli from the moment you wake until you go to bed in the evening.
My blog is easily lost in the 3,000+ message choices you have every day.
When I worked for a large insurance company, our company’s print shop staff had a joke they repeated often. The printers said they should put a barrel at the end of the printing presses so as the sales materials came off the presses they could go directly into the trash.
Well, we recycled, but you get the idea.
Do you have an association meeting coming up? Are you planning a conference? Whatever bank or credit union group you’re involved with, you need to fill meetings and event programs with professional speakers who can deliver advice on timely topics that focus on the financial services industry.
To help you solve your scheduling and offer you fresh insight, check the Speakers Bureau on the ACTON Marketing website.
How would you react if your doctor or dentist sent you a letter or email promoting a checking or savings account? Like me, you’d probably be concerned as to the motivation behind such an offer. After all, checking and savings accounts having nothing to do with the practice of medicine or dentistry. It would be so strange that many of us might consider switching doctors or dentists.
I don’t want my doctor and dentist straying from their fields of expertise.
After I read the contents page of the July Consumer Reports magazine, I flipped directly to page 16 for the article, “What’s wrong with customer service?” I wanted to see if it said anything about financial institutions.
Nothing. The inevitable comparison chart with 21 categories of businesses came no closer to banking than a category for brokerage firms.
Silly me…I thought the recent housing crash had finally brought an end to reckless mortgage lending and careless borrowing. But, obviously I was wrong.
What changed my mind was a credit union ad appearing in last week’s edition of the local alternative newspaper. It was the headline that caught my attention and dragged me into the copy.
As a marketing professional, you’re familiar with the term “branding.” Have you heard of “lifestyle branding” and would it work for your financial institution?
Lifestyle branding goes beyond corporate colors, special fonts, taglines, and positioning of logos that all apply to branding. It’s also not about the “yes, we’re great” vagueness that often defines branded advertising. Lifestyle branding attempts to position the company or product as an important, even integral part of a person’s life.
Luxury brands are obvious lifestyle branding examples. It’s important to the users that their clothing sport an Yves Saint Laurent tag or they have Tiffany items on display in their homes.
As a financial services marketer, you should know auto sales have been steadily climbing over the past year. Buyers are back in the market after a tight-fisted attitude toward spending money early in the recession.
As a financial services marketer, you should encourage your bank or credit union to actively pursue loans for this hot consumer product. After all, your competition is probably already advertising.
Anyone paying attention to the news these days – especially online news – is well aware that the four mega-banks are busy increasing existing fees, adding new fees, and adding or increasing minimum balance requirements on checking accounts. A number of smaller banks are doing so as well.
In other words, you’re going to pay more if you have a checking account with one of these banks.
A blog reader asked some interesting questions about one of my past posts. I feel the answers deserve a post of their own.
My original post said free checking was introduced to the public through community banks and credit unions in the 1980s. Eventually, free checking spread everywhere. I suggested, now that the larger banks are dropping free checking and it’s once again becoming the domain of community institutions, that we might be repeating the cycle.
Susan, our reader, commented, “This is definitely interesting. But to what extent are non-free checking banks losing customers? With banks offering qualifying activities to continue to receive free checking, aren’t they simply losing the customers that don’t qualify and are therefore unprofitable?”
“What a coincidence” I thought after reading Joe’s blog yesterday. After two years of writing these blogs, Joe and I occasionally find ourselves on the same wave length at the same time.
This is one of those times.
No matter how much flash and hoopla you throw into an advertising campaign, success depends on your product.
The latest evidence comes from fast food chain Burger King. Over the past couple of years, BK’s ad agency created edgy, sometimes off-putting commercials featuring a costumed King character. Recently, the food giant switched agencies and plans to return to a focus on its food.
The problem with the King commercials seemed to be with the King himself. He distracted from the primary message “buy food at Burger King” by his antics.
