A Story About Good Marketing
People LOVE stories. We crave stories. Without them, we wouldn’t have movies or music. I can’t remember any conference I’ve been to where the keynote speaker didn’t tell a story to keep the audience engaged.
People as me all the time “how do I make my marketing successful?” One large ingredient is finding the stories. Erin Brokovich, Remember the Titans, Pursuit of Happyness, The Blind Side…these are all movies built around a story.
Remember the Titans isn’t a football movie. It is a movie about how a high school football team overcame racial prejudice and changed an entire town in the process.
A Beautiful Mind is not about a man who won the Nobel Prize. It is about a math prodigy who learned to live with mental illness in order to keep his family and his career.
There are stories happening EVERY DAY in your credit union. We see them as auto loans, home mortgages, checking accounts, and other services. But, to our members, they are getting the minivan for their family road trips, their dream homes, and we are helping them on that path by providing them affordable banking services with our own personal touch.
Want your marketing to stand out? Find the stories in your credit union.Your members have stories to tell. Our recent collaboration with Andy Janning was all about magnifying the stories of an urban credit union in Indiana by photographing its members and hearing how the credit union has helped them through the years. It was the most powerful project to date in my career and I am excited to see this project continue to unfold and catch fire.
I say this all the time, but I believe that credit unions have THE best brand story of any industry ANYWHERE. Why? Because we do what the big banks do, but we do it with heart and soul with our members at the forefront of every decision we make. And we do it because we care. We aren’t in it for the money.
If we get good as an industry about providing a platform for our members to tell their stories about how their credit union has specifically made a difference in their lives, and people like those people see those stories, they will identify with those stories. They will share those stories. They will tell their own stories. That is what good marketing is all about.