What is your ultimate measure of marketing effectiveness?
It can be summarised as A+D+S:
Awareness among our target market.
Distinction: does our market know how we are different from the competitor down the street and unique?
Salience: does the dimension that makes us unique matter to our target audience?
And, obviously, there is bottom-line growth and profitability. We were founded at the end of the financial crisis (2010), and since then have become one of the fastest-growing banks in the western region of the US. In terms of assets, of the 5,500-plus banks across the nation, we are now among the top 200.
Is creativity still the biggest driver of marketing success?
I would say it’s employee engagement, which is the ultimate force multiplier in the market. Everyone is part of the marketing team, and genuine value creation is everyone’s job. Do our teams understand our purpose – why we exist, and how we make the world a better place for our clients by relieving pain, which represents an impediment to their achieving their goals and vision for their company? If so, every touchpoint becomes a powerful marketing tool.
How do you drive marketing effectiveness at a large Commercial and Investment Bank?
This is what we believe: stop selling your products and services, and start engaging your communities on matters that are important to them. We are a commercial bank, so our audience is concerned with business growth and expansion, and with the political and economic environment that enables this growth.
Our social channels provide counsel on growth. Our bankers are trained to understand our clients’ vision for the growth of their companies – and to bring not only the capital, but also the counsel required to achieve it. All of our communications reflect this commitment. We engage more than 150,000 influential decision-makers a year, in person, to advance economic, political and business topics that are important to our target market.
What will be the key drivers of effectiveness in your future marketing?
Communicating genuine value to our clients and prospects. Value has little to do with what you pay. Value creation is driven by what you get – quality, quantity and an experience – relative to what you pay, which includes not only money, but also time and emotion. When you capitalise on the time and emotion components of value creation, it initiates a powerful force multiplier in the market.
Also, simultaneously, employee engagement. Our team members have to know what behaviours drive value creation, and what pain their actions relieve, which sets them apart from every other competitor in the market.
Nordstrom accommodated. And never said no.
We asked thousands of residential solar shoppers across the nation what they thought of the product. Nearly 50% of all active solar shoppers were willing to pay nearly $2,000 for the protection plan as an add-on to their solar purchase. (We got the price to $12.99 a month.)
At great companies, great management teams have strong and emphatic reasons the company is the best in the market. In fact, as companies grow, adding people and perspectives, positive dissonance is inevitable. Why the company wins is an empowering topic where company-wide alignment is essential–so everyone can help create value. Most importantly, you can’t be clear externally, until you’re aligned and clear internally.
Try this experiment with the leadership team. Ask them to write down why you win. Why your company is the market’s first choice relative to the competition. Don’t do a round-table discussion. Instead, ask everyone to read their answer together, all at once.
When great companies are face-to-face, consumers see—a sea of same. Sales are tougher, margin is compressed — internal teams begin to doubt. Impacting the collective perception—inside and out—becomes imperative.
Surprisingly, whether the brand is accelerating or decelerating can generally be predicted with the answer to a single question.