Love, Hate and Indifference

Jeff Stephens’ comment to my post yesterday makes a great point about refining your message enough to allow customers and prospective customers to “clearly determine that you’re not what they’re looking for.” The flip side to this, of course, is that a refined message will allow others to clearly determine that your institution is exactly what they are looking for.

If you think about it across a spectrum with love on one side, hate on the other and indifference in the middle, we see too many banks seeking the comfortable middle ground with generic and all-inclusive messages – and this does nothing more than create a large group people who don’t really care about you one way or another.

Herein lies a challenge for many institutions – make a decision: decide who it is that you really want to love your institution. Then, hold that up to the messages you are putting out there. Do your messages resonate with this group; encourage them to establish and build a relationship with you; and make it easy for them to refer their peers to your institution?

At the end of the day, the customers that really love your institution will still be your most valuable customers – even when your competitor offers a little better rate or the latest iPod for opening a new account. And once you can take a stance and add real value to a focused target market (decide who should love you and who should hate you) you can differentiate your institution from the “all things to all people” competition, and allow your target to easily see that you are the best choice for them.