The Story

Today I’ll take a break from my branding and multi-sensory marketing soapbox and report about an interesting experience I recently had. A couple weeks ago I had the pleasure of speaking at the Best Marketing Password 2008 conference in the Baltics. First stop was Vilnius, Lithuania. Then it was on to Riga, Latvia, and finally to Tartu in Estonia. I was asked to share my insights into successful non-traditional, experiential and multi-sensory bank marketing and branding, using my experiences with Umpqua Bank as an example. The audiences were very interested in the story and engaged by the non-traditional tactics.

Presenting at Best Marketing Password 2008 conference

I learned that in the Baltics, banking is dominated by a small number of large banks, much different than our financial industry here in the states. Perhaps most interestingly, because of the former Soviet influence in that region, until 1991 technology was extremely outdated. Then in 1991 when the Soviet influence ended, the region went technologically from the 1940’s straight to the 1990’s–bypassing things like paper checks, etc.. So in many ways their current banking systems are far more electronically sophisticated than what we have in the US.

What that has resulted in is a very detached banking experience for customers. The technologies serve their needs well, but it has removed any potential emotional bond between the customer and the bank. Enter branding–the process of re-building that emotional connection. So while it’s obviously not appropriate (not ever is for any bank or credit union marketer) to create a Lithuanian Lemonaire campaign, there was a lot to be learned by the audiences from the successful unique strategies employed by leaders like Umpqua Bank here in the U.S.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 20th, 2008 at 12:25 pm and is filed under Other, Bank Branding, Bank Marketing, Branding, Umpqua Bank Marketing & Branding, Experiential Brands. 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.