The Story

Our final discussion from the recent ABA Bank Marketing Conference is about branding banks across business units and market segments. As Brady mentioned in his post on the Grow Your Bank blog, this question was raised by a bank marketing person who was essentially posed the “should I develop a different bank brand for each of my business units or market segments?”

In my world, this question comes up a lot. While it’s a complex situation and I can appreciate that it’s not an easy one to deal with if you’re a large and diverse bank, but fortunately the principle is simple and easy to understand: you only have one brand.

I often tell my audiences, clients, and others that brands are like people. I think that’s a pretty widely accepted metaphor, given especially the notoriety of articles, books, etc., such as Tom Peters‘ article from Fast Company a decade ago, The Brand Called You.

So think about brands like people. In my case, I’m Jeff Stephens. I’m always Jeff, the same guy, no matter which of my “business units or market segments” I’m talking to. In other words, I’m still the same Jeff whether I’m talking to you, to my employees, to my grandma or my barber. My brand is the same for all of them.

What may change, though, is the exact way I articulate my brand to each of those people. I may use different words with my grandma than with my employees–but I’m still the same guy.

Your brand is the same way. You may tailor your delivery of your bank’s brand differently to each market segment, but it’s the same brand for all of them. You can only have one brand, but you may very well have a few different subsets of the way you communicate it, based on the market you’re communicating with.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 15th, 2007 at 2:48 pm and is filed under Bank Branding, Bank Marketing, Branding, Corporate branding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.