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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