The first rule of successful credit union marketing that you must remember is:
You are inside of your credit union, looking out. Potential members are outside of your credit union, looking in.
Your inside-looking-out perspective makes you blind in one eye. Confirmation bias makes you blind in the other eye.
You cannot see yourself the way your potential members see you. You imagine they see you based on your mission statement, your policies and procedures, your good intentions, your employee training… You imagine that potential credit union members see you the way you want to be seen.
You see those things—you care about those things! Your potential member doesn’t know or see them, not yet. And (GASP!) they don’t care. They have problems. Big problems. They have debt spiraling out of control, causing stress and anxiety. They are living paycheck to paycheck, wondering what to do when that one small emergency inevitably happens, and they don’t have the means to fix it. They worry they will miss their kids’ games, performances, and lives because they have to work overtime to make ends meet.
Here’s the hard truth: When you’ve convinced your credit union marketing person to see your credit union the same way you do, that marketing person has nothing left to offer you but flattery—not results.
Back in my radio days, this weathered, old ad guy once said something I’ve carried with me to this day:
“Our industry is drowning in math and starving for ideas. We need people who can dream shit up. We need impractical, illogical people. We have plenty of data. We need more of the opposite. We have forgotten that the only unique benefits we can provide to clients is imaginative thinking and creativity. Everything else, aside from ideas, they can get somewhere else. Good ideas are good ideas. Things that are entertaining, interesting, and uplifting will always be attractive to everyone.”
It comes down to the basic principles of advertising, and business in general. Some thoughts to consider:
“Good inventors and designers (and marketers) deeply understand their customer. They spend tremendous energy developing that intuition. They study and understand many anecdotes rather than only the averages you’ll find on surveys.”
– Jeff Bezos, Amazon
“First principles is kind of a physics way of looking at the world. You boil things down to the most fundamental truths and say, ‘What are we sure is true?’ … and then reason up from there.”
– Elon Musk, Tesla and SpaceX
“Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them… Indeed, the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas.”
– Peter Thiel, PayPal
Credit union marketing strategies are successful when we remember these basic principles. Your members aren’t looking for a product or a service. They are looking for transformation. They are looking for a solution. They want a hole in the wall but need the hammer to make it happen.
In short: Don’t try to convince your members and potential members to think and feel like you do. Learn how to think and feel like them.
