Are you making yourself indispensable to your business customers? Treat them like rock stars and they’ll have little reason to consider doing business with other institutions.

You don't have to stock their offices with M&M's (minus a certain color) and a special brand of sparkling water.

It’s time for an update. You’ve held the focus groups, shopped the competition and worked with your agency to create a brand that truly differentiates your institution from all others. One caveat: don’t launch it to customers and the public without a memorable premier for your most critical audience—employees.  

For many, branding involves only 1 or 2 sensory experiences. But brands that engage all 5 senses create something super sticky. Like double stick tape, 
it's nearly impossible to put down. Here are 5 ways to bond your brand to its fans.

It’s an all-too-common malady: sales are flabby or fundraising goals are lagging, so leadership determines that a fresh new ad campaign is just the thing to make everything right.

When we start asking questions to diagnose the situation, we often discover something else: an internal problem.

I recently asked a variety of C-level people how often they were called on by a banker trying to get their business. I heard one thing that surprised me—and it’s not what you think.

Several said they don’t really need a loan, so they weren’t that interested in talking to a banker. Wait. What?!

When I was a new college freshman, a classmate who was also from out of town attempted to make a deposit in the local “first national bank.” It wasn’t the same “first national” that she had at home, but she hadn’t realized that. Some big confusion about her account ensued. 

Marketers are spending a lot of time talking about the customer journey. We’re not hearing the same talk about the employee journey, and that’s a shame. Because the customer journey with your brand will be bumpy at best if the employee journey isn’t thoughtfully mapped out and put into action first.

I recently had trouble with a community bank’s technology and emailed a banker there to complain in what I hope was a polite—but very frustrated—manner. The response was swift and unexpected.

 She thanked me.