I found myself wondering this morning if local banks and credit unions would be aggressively marketing checking accounts right now if the media was suddenly full of bad news about the big four – Wells, Citi, JPMorgan Chase, and B of A.

The reason for this thought is that about all I’m seeing and hearing these days are ads and commercials for retirement savings accounts or IRAs.

You see, devoting your first quarter’s marketing budget to promoting IRAs is a bank marketing habit that’s been around for three decades or longer.

Apparently, it’s a habit that is hard to break.

Yet, given all the upheaval in the financial services industry these days, recent legislation, and the intermittent stream of negative news about Wall Street and the large mega-banks, you’d think now would be the ideal time to break the IRA marketing habit and shift to checking account marketing – especially if you are a small community bank or credit union.

An article in today’s The Sacramento Bee reinforced my thoughts on this issue.

It is a business section article about Golden1 Credit Union and its ongoing billboard campaign poking fun at the mega-banks.  A comment in this article grabbed my attention.  According to the credit union’s CEO, “…Golden1’s billboard campaign dovetailed with a 30 percent-plus spike in checking accounts last summer – a development Golden1 attributed to growing dissatisfaction with the big banks.”

I don’t know about you, but an increase in checking account openings of 30 percent or more during a normal slow time of the year – the summer months – is off-the-charts great.  It’s a startling number.

I hope they were dancing on their desks over at the Golden1 headquarters.

Given this success, if I were the CMO at Golden1, I’d be campaigning to dump the IRA marketing effort and focus almost exclusively on hammering checking accounts – including Golden1’s free checking.

This opportunity reminds me of the old proverb, “Make hay while the sun shines.”

Well, the sun is shining brightly right now on all the smaller community banks and credit unions that avoided the mortgage meltdown.  They are now perceived as safe havens by a majority of consumers.

So now seems the right time to break those old bank marketing habits and embrace change.

Forget about IRAs, forget about regular savings accounts, forget about auto loans, and forget about equity lines and loans.  Make hay while the sun shines.  Provide every reason possible why consumers would be better off moving their checking accounts from the big banks to your smaller, safer, local bank or credit union.

And stop worrying about repetition and whether or not your checking message is getting stale.  This is a disease that only afflicts marketers who spend 40-60 hours a week, month after month, working on the same product message.

Remember the sage advice of David Ogilvy, one of the country’s greatest advertising persons, “You aren’t advertising to a standing army; you are advertising to a moving parade.”

And, there’s a lot to be said about the power of repetition and frequency when it comes to getting across your marketing message.

Dump the IRA ads and replace them with your checking products.