One of the banking industry’s more active associations, the NC Bankers Association (NCBA) conducts the country’s oldest state association banking school. Held every August in Chapel Hill, the school is a four-year course of instruction, grooming ‘up-and-comers’ to take their place in the economy’s most vital industry, the banking sector. North Carolina is a solid financial center due largely to the first-class education many of its bankers have received at NC Bankers’ School of Banking.

Apple Advertising has always been a strong supporter of the banking industry in general and the NC Bankers in particular. This year we continued to put our money where our mouth is and enrolled Zack Self in the school as a freshman to attend the week course during August 8-13, 2010. We’re happy to report that he applied himself, studied hard and passed the final exam.  That means he can return to Chapel Hill next August as a sophomore.

Congratulations to Zack and the 180 or more students and graduates of the 2010 NC School of Banking. We wish all of you the very best.

The banking industry needs all the bright minds it can get.

However, there’s help, from the excellent book Kellogg on Marketing.  In the book you’ll find ten elements of a good marketing strategy.  These elements are receiving a lot of attention by smart people in business.  We’re including them in our client’s marketing plans – and we think you should including them in your plans, as well.  (Here’s the best part: they are easy to understand and measure.)

The table below came from research notes we did for a client back in 2002-3. It proved helpful in focusing the content of boardroom presentations and in preparing various communications.  The attributes are still in play and performing well. We hope this list (and the book) will be helpful to you, too, as you seek to innovate in today’s new market.

Look to see which ones your company has employed is or is working to employ. Which ones have you found to be most effective? Which ones haven’t you pursued that merit attention?  Let me know what you think: zself@appleadv.com.

Look to see which ones your company has employed is or is working to employ. Which ones have you found to be most effective? Which ones haven’t you pursued that merit attention?

_________________

The book Kellogg on Marketing , from which this list was compiled was written by the Kellogg Marketing Faculty of Northwestern University and is highly recommended reading if you are charged with driving the process of marketing in your organization. This book has an especially good chapter on Market Channel Design & Management. You can get it from Asheville’s Biblo.com, a great online bookstore or directly from the publisher John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

It is good to remember that creativity is critical to the success of your personal and business endeavors. Make sure that you and yours are within an environment that fosters creative thinking and rewards the process of innovation. This is harder to attain than it should be and may require drastic action. But if the game is worth the candle, then any action that will produce creative innovation is certainly worthwhile.

The Gossamer Condor story is worth your time to read. There have long been victors who were creative enough to approach challenges differently, who achieved distinction with innovative attempts to reach their goal.

I trust that such an approach continues to inspire you and produce great accomplishment for you and yours as it has for us. Our firm has enjoyed the great honor and privilege of helping people and their companies thrive with innovative applications of creative thinking since 1971.

[Thanks to Wikipedia and Wired.com for the inspiration.]

Pretty neat. Like all brilliantly simple concepts, it is clear and useful. And it’s teachable. Yes, it is intuitive. What I like most is that it puts intuition to paper. It also helps to add volume to that little voice inside your head that is sometimes unfortunately ignored.

I learned about this technique from the very bright Melissa Murray, Chief Inspiration Officer of Mosaix Group and currently in Asheville, NC. Like most of us Melissa detests having to deal with dumb issues related to people management, but unlike most people she figured out how to deal with the problem.

This new “tool” allowed her to make good assessments quickly so she could get on with her real work. She developed it while traveling the world producing events for large corporations back in a former life. She found that time and distance amplified strengths (and defects) in the people working on the account with her.

The technique is founded on the principle that a person’s ability to perform in a progressive organization can be isolated into two discrete camps: (1) their knowledge and (2) their motivation. And, it is a way to evaluate the degrees of each component. One person can have more knowledge, or greater motivation, than another can.

Recently, I asked her to lunch to refresh me on how this system worked. The diagram above is a slightly modified version of what she drew.

Here’s how it works

The relationship between knowledge and motivation is depicted with a simple diagram, and the relative placement of the intersection within the diagram allows a manager to make a meaningful assessment of the employee. Thus, we have Motivated and Unmotivated one axis, Clueless, and Knowledgeable at each respective end of the other axis. (How you assess where the person would appear on the axis is a topic for another post.) Melissa notes that in addition to never hiring a clueless and unmotivated person, she will never hire a knowledgeable person that is not motivated. In addition, in evaluating potential cuts, determining the relative value of employees is greatly helped by this system.

What’s important is that you carefully consider the implications of hiring a motivated but relatively clueless person as opposed to a highly motivated and highly knowledgeable one. (It occurred to me that this same decision model could help determine the efficacy of a new product or marketing campaign. I found this process helped me to figure out what was wrong with a particular client’s reaction to a campaign, and helped me get my groove back. Whatever works.)

So, what do you think? What has been your experience in evaluating employees? Do you see this system working as part of an evaluation of how to invest in customers? Too simple to be effective?

Drop us a line and let’s talk about it. (And be sure to thank Melissa Murray for the insight.)

What you are is functional, it can be bought. But who you are, now there’s something that can’t quite be quantified and priced.   It is that which makes you unique, different. It is that which sets you apart from the competition.  It is, to borrow a phrase, ‘priceless’ because it gives your customers a reason to be loyal to you, even in today’s commodity-driven market.

What people mean to each other is what makes a romance last.
What a business means to its customers is what makes it thrive.

There has been a lot of talk lately of the deterioration of brand value.  The numbers don’t lie, consumers are now moving in unprecedented numbers to ‘generic’ products and services that cost less than ‘premium’ brands.   But, what happens when two similar products are similarly priced?  In that case, the difference is distinguished only by personality. So,…

Let’s think about your personality.

What is your brand personality?   Describe it – in terms that are important to customers.   Now, ask yourself, how well does it scale, how easy would it be to double your business and keep your same personality?  Finally, ask your self, “How good a job am I doing letting the world know about my brand personality?  The lesson: be interesting enough, passionate enough and smart enough that people want to buy what YOU have to sell because you add some very desirable “something” to the process.

Why is your personality important?

Who you are should drive your product development and your delivery.  Otherwise, your personality has no focus, and your product and/or service has no value beyond its how your prices rank against your competitors.

Decide “who” you are.  Decide why that’s important to your customers.  Figure out how to translate your personality into meaningful, relevant marketing messages.   By the way, this is not as easy as it sounds.  Take a look around and see if you can think of more than 5 local companies in your market who have a precise fix on their brand personality and who are effectively communicating it effectively.

You may need professional help to ensure marketing communication relevance. It’s OK, you have other skills needed to make money. However, don’t be content to think that your brand personality will simply evolve to an adequate object. Consult with a professional marketing/advertising company.  Help them get close to you, to spend the time necessary to get to know you well and create some powerful, motivating marketing messages that will move you to the top of the market.  Challenge them to be inspiring.  Then, stand back, and cut ‘em loose.

What do you think?

We want your feedback on this article. Drop us a line or leave a comment on this blog post.

A:         Making a positive difference to the customers.

The businesses (and their consultants) who maintain a precise focus on the customer value delivered by IT will thrive.  Those who don’t won’t.

There is no end to the alternatives a technology buffet provides for business. A discerning company will buy the things that make their customers happier.  So, information technology investments must pass very simple tests:

1. Does it matter to the customer?
2. Will it improve their life?
3. Will it save them money?
4. Will it make them money?
5. Will it make them look like a hero?

If you can train your company to competently analyze and then produce solutions relevant to your customers, then you will have achieved something truly marketable.  Here’s some ideas for your next IT meeting agenda:

1. What have we done to reduce the set of complex information technology possibilities to the necessary fundamental choice as an example to our employees?
2. What have we and/or the company recently done to improve customers’ situation by means of technology?

Once you begin thinking that way great things can happen. Here are two examples:

One client, in the interest of his clients, distilled their huge volume of customer information to three simple characteristics based on three customer transaction attributes knows as RFM (“recentcy”, frequency, monetary) to depict when they last transacted, how often they transacted over time increments and how much they purchased. It’s a concept that has worked wonders for their business model. Teaching managers and sales staff to monitor a simple set of customer data drives performance.

Another client found that tens of thousands of dollars could be saved every year by eschewing custom data warehouse reports and licenses in favor of Excel’s built-in data analysis tools for internal analysis and KPIs.  Using simple OBDC queries with Excel provided excellent information, and at the same time, saved a ton of money that could be spent on things important to the customer.

What matters about IT is what you do with it.  You should pay attention to how well you perform in the IT arena, because your customers are watching.

We want your feedback!

What have you done to make Information Technology great for customers? Drop us a line or leave a comment.

Here are some ideas that will help you to achieve your own social media marketing success.

A fundamental of marketing is that corporate messages have distinct characteristics sustained over time. The messaging must:

1. be interesting,
2. suggest value,
3. create expectation, and
4. satisfy demands.

Consistent realization of these goals is the hallmark of a professional marketer.

Don’t try this at home.

Speaking of the mark of a professional, you may have been impressed by the hip, new “amateur” work posted on YouTube and the success of young entrepreneurs who became successful without the usual services such advertising agencies or video professionals. Sorry to tell you, but that’s not going to work for you. You already have what these people wanted when they started, and you now have it to lose. (By the way, many of the alleged amateur productions out there are not amateur at all but rather contrived by professional writers and producers.)

What is really important?

It is true that the production “value” doesn’t matter as much as used to. But, what does matter is the thinking behind the production– expressed in words and speech.  Such professional-grade thinking has never been more critically important.  What is so cool about the web, and the social marketing tools that deliver it, is that the viewers are able to “fall in love” with the message, the content.  If it moves them, they like it, they will quickly share with others what they like and reward the source of the good content.

What’s the Social Media Marketing bottom line?

Concentrate on being relevant to your market.  Then, work to transmit messages that are relevant to who you are and what your market wants to know.  Form a relationship with a professional advertising and marketing firm who has Social Media experience.   Work with them to develop a marketing communication competence good for your revenue stream. (By the way, the communication competency expressed in marketing and advertising will also help your sales team.  Click to read a great article from Sales Coach that should be incorporated in your sales meetings.)

We want your feedback!

What have you done with the new media, social media, that was great marketing? Drop us a line or leave a comment. We’d love to hear about your success!

Here’s how you find out if you’re relevant – or not.

Evaluate your company’s communication.  A majority of companies large and small fall into three categories listed below, each with an example from actual Twitter and Facebook posts:

1. Positively irrelevant to customers. (“We have 458 fans. We want 1000. Become a fan today!“)
2. Passively irrelevant to customers. (“Sitting enjoying a cup of coffee in <my neighborhood> at <coffee shop>. Thanks <coffee shop>!“)
3. Passively relevant to customers. (“See our new widget save 35% on electric bills. Click here  <link to digital brochure-ware>.“)

Remember the rule of “so what”.

People read FaceBook and Twitter posts with a brutally efficient filter, one my company calls the “So what?!” filter.  If the filter returns a weak response, boom, they move on.

To create this situation either because of a lack of skills or a lack of attention is a serious mistake. Weak communication causes you to lose an opportunity either to generate revenue or establish a valuable relationship.  Even worse, you lose respect as a viable company in the market.

If you can’t do social media right, perhaps you should not do it at all.

To make social media work you must have exceptional writing skills at your disposal.

Simply hiring someone who “knows about the internet” does not mean you have a competent marketing resource. Social media communication must be relevant to your customers, it must function professionally.  Think about this: skills needed to buy the groceries are not the same skills needed to make great osso bucco.   The lesson: your social media must express your brand in the best possible way, which is to be relevant to the customer.  How do you obtain exceptional writing skills?  You search out for yourself a professional copywriter, someone who has the ability to compose words that sell.  (The good news is that good copywriters can still be found. The bad news is very few of them are under 40.)

How can you be relevant?  Easy.  Talk about what matters.

Remember that copywriter referred to earlier?  That’s who you need to “talk the relevant talk”.  Spend money on a good writer or hire an experienced communication firm.  Customers (and shareholders) deserve your best effort in this regard.

Get your writer thinking about how to make sure that what your company communicates via Twitter, Facebook, your blog, web site, et al, matters to the people who matter to you.

[Editor’s Note: More information about this topic can be found in “Marketing with Social Media”, a blog we posted subsequent to this one.]

We want your feedback!

What have you done with social media that was great for your company? Drop us a line or leave a comment.

And that’s not all.

Here’s the really interesting part: all of the smaller competitors have almost nothing to say.  Not a peep.  Almost none of them get out front with the message “Hey, now’s a good time to switch to me!”

Sound strange?  Well, this is what’s happening to community banking – at least in my small corner of the world. It beats anything I’ve ever seen in my 20+ years of watching.

Here’s why this matters. And what community bankers can do about it.

A recent study found that in 2009 small businesses were far more likely to have their credit needs met by a community bank than by the 18 largest banks. Re-read the first sentence, slowly. Do you get what I get by this? The local community bank is the best source of credit to small business. So, what do you think? Is this a marketing opportunity for community banks? The US is still a “market”, right?

So, why aren’t community bankers making hay with this?

We don’t know for sure, but we do think they may be crazy. Small business brings not only manageable lending demand, but they also bring low-cost deposits. Many small businesses are still viable. Small businesses are not that hard to sell. They want attention. They want to be important. And, they want to be the object of a bank’s intelligent interest. So, what’s so hard about mounting a small business campaign?

Here’s another opportunity community banks are missing.

Joe Customer, his wife, family, employees and neighbors don’t think there’s much difference between Bank of America and Bank of Main Street. (We know this because we talk to bank customers all the time.) So, if you’re Bank of Main Street you need to be out in the market, making sure everyone knows why your bank is the best bank in the Universe….or at least, within 50 miles!

But, again, the community bankers are being very quiet about this. Very quiet…

So, what is a community banker to do?

Grab some market share. Don’t miss the opportunity that the competition is handing to you on a plate. Don’t make excuses. Particularly, don’t say “I can’t afford it.” You don’t know that until you price it.

Here’s something to think about. If you have $1 million of excess capital and a fairly stable loan portfolio you can probably afford to spend between $25,000 and $100,000 to get on top of your market. For most living bankers, market share has never been this inexpensive.

How do you get your arms around this?

Hire a bank marketing and advertising firm who cares about the banking community and who has the seasoned experience to create an affordable, and effective, method to capitalize on the community banking opportunity of the century!

We want your feedback!

What do you think? What has your bank done that was great for your small business customers? Drop us a line or leave a comment.

First Question: What solution do you plan to deploy that will help your cope with shrinking NSF income?

Second Question: What makes you think your customers will stand for your solution?

Third Question: What are you doing to locate the IT supplemental support you’ll need to implement alternative NSF income programs? (Hopefully, you’re not going to get in bed with your core processor’s ‘preferred vendor’.)

Last Question: How are you going to afford all this?

Clearly, you need a strategy and a plan — and, it needs to be a damn good strategy and plan.  That means you need:

(1) research that provides good data and

(2) viable alternatives and,

(3) a sharp marketing campaign the bank can afford.

You could do this yourself.  Maybe.  If  you had the right resources in your bank.

Or, of course, you can do nothing – and get further behind.

Or, you could call a professional bank marketing and IT company.  (This is the recommended solution.  We even know people who do this. )

Call us now, 365/24/7. Help will be in your office — or on the phone — in 24 hours, or less.