The Story

I’m pleased to introduce a new mini-series within The Story, called “Amusing Yet Disturbing.” In this series, I’ll share with you some of the “amusing, yet disturbing” questions, discussions and comments I come across from bank and credit union marketing folks. Why are these items both amusing and disturbing? Because they often show […]

Yesterday, I attended the AMA’s Forward 08 non-traditional marketing event. There was a notable concentration on word of mouth marketing - what works, what doesn’t, and why it’s important. The importance is pretty obvious (people trust their peers more than they trust advertising). But some people might still be asking: what creates […]

I’m here at MAC with Jeff, promoting experiential brand building and multi-sensory marketing to some pretty cool credit union folks. This is my first trip to MAC, so I’m not sure if it’s the audience or us, but they really seem engaged by what we’re talking about.
Hearing about multi-sensory marketing, they ask, what does […]

If you’ve talked with me for more than about 10 minutes, you’ve discovered I like analogies and metaphors. A speaker here at MAC 2008 today used a metaphor as she talked to credit union marketing people about member satisfaction surveys. She was talking about how little those membership surveys actually mean. To […]

It only took about 10 minutes to get our wrists slapped at MAC this morning. After all, we did kinda hijack the event, taking a lot of the attention…even if just for a few minutes. Oh wait, that was the point. Mission accomplished.
So what was it that garnered so much attention? I […]

The booth is set up. Anticipation is high. And CBC is about to drop some experiential guerrilla marketing on these credit union marketers here at the 2008 Marketing Association of Credit Unions (MAC) conference.
That’s right–it’s go time.
Throughout the day I’ll be live-blogging to give you a taste of what’s up here […]

I had a tremendous, highly personalized experience recently with a local mortgage broker, Mortgage Trust (a CBC client) and it made me realize how un-personal my other loan experiences with banks have been. Most banks marketing themselves as customer-centric have a long way to go to compare with this company.
After completing a loan transaction, […]

Oh how I wish my bank would stage something like this. The long and boring waits to speak with a loan officer would be so much more tolerable.

Lastminute.com - a site offering cheap city breaks and last minute trips - knows how to make the most of having a large captive audience of disgruntled […]

Max Havelaar, the label that was the world’s first Fairtrade Certification Mark, recently released a viral marketing video to help promote fairtrade. I personally find this cool for two reasons. A) I got to hear one of Max Havelaar’s team members lecture about corporate social responsibility during a student conference in Copenhagen (back […]

Good news–after a bit of drama, I’m happy to follow up to my previous post, It’s Hard To Eat Your Own Dogfood, and report that we did the right thing. We’ve separated from a client who was not a good fit. Does it hurt revenue? Yes. Is it frustrating as hell? […]