When Alan Bergstrom joined Community Choice Credit Union in November 2014 as its SVP of strategic development and chief marketing officer, the credit union was managing $530 million in assets and serving 53,000 members out of eight branches. Since then, the Farmington Hills, Mich.-based Community Choice has grown to $853 million assets and serves more than 80,000 members from 16 branches.
While several factors fueled Community Choice's growth over the last two years, including mergers, Bergstrom played a critical leadership role.
"Alan's leadership in marketing and strategy have made dramatic changes at Community Choice. Not only are we now seen as a force to be reckoned with, but we have greatly expanded our reach and marketing activities in media and channels that had never been used before," Bergstrom's colleagues wrote in nominating him as the CU Times Trailblazer Marketing Executive of the Year. "Our growth can be attributed Alan's outstanding leadership in marketing and advertising, product development, member experience and retail growth strategy. Our media reach was doubled (as measured by number of impressions), and even members have commented on how proud they are to see their credit union being visible through the markets being served."
Interestingly enough, Bergstrom is a relative newcomer to the credit union industry. His first credit union job came in May 2012 when he was named director of brand and creative services for CUNA Mutual Group in Madison, Wis. He helped the organization develop and launch its direct-to-consumer TruStage Insurance brand.
Before joining CUNA Mutual Group, he worked with Blue Chip companies, including some banks and credit unions, while he served as the founder, partner, president/CEO and executive director at eight different strategic and brand organizations for nearly three decades.
From 1986 to 1989, he served as a director for Naisbitt Group/Diefenbach Elkins, which later became FutureBrand. John Naisbitt was the best-selling author of Megatrends, Megatrends 2000 and other books.
Bergstrom said he worked with Naisbitt to promote the emerging idea of business intelligence and positioning corporations for the future based in part on current and emerging trends in social demographics, economics, technology and other areas.
"Today we call it brand strategy, and that's in effect what happened," Bergstrom said. "I got into the marketing world by way of brand strategy development working for a number of blue chip clients."
Bergstrom didn't plan to be a leading brand strategist when he launched his career back in 1979.
His first dream was to become a fighter pilot and he completed his undergraduate degree on a U.S. Air Force ROTC scholarship.
"As fate would have it, it took me a little bit off that track and I ended up in the Air force in the intelligence field," he recalled. "There was a lot of strategy involved, but also a lot of analysis. I guess the way I tend to describe it to people it's like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. These different pieces of information are out there and by themselves don't mean very much, but when you start to put them together in the right way, like a jigsaw puzzle, and the pieces come together, you can stand back and see a bigger picture emerging from it."
For seven years, U.S. Air Force Captain Bergstrom was based in the Pentagon and worked as a Soviet air analyst, chief West European analyst and as a daily military intelligence briefer for the White House when Ronald Reagan was president.
Undoubtedly, Bergstrom said, that military training and experience helped him throughout his successful career in business intelligence, brand strategy and marketing.
"So many credit unions today, I think, are just reporting out the data. We were, too, for a long time spewing out reports month after month whether it's membership data, product penetration or product performance data, but nobody really knows what to do with it," Bergstrom said. "What kind of action can we take from it to improve or enhance what we're doing? That's a big focus here, partly under my leadership, but we recently just hired a data analytics manager who brings some background in predictive analytics. I think that's going to be a huge area for the credit unions to make sense of that information and being able to predict what's going to happen to segments of our membership based on that, the insights we draw from that data."
While predictive analytics can be an effective tool to anticipate what products and services members are looking for, Bergstrom said it's important for credit unions not to get trapped into doing the same marketing campaigns that have always been done in the past.
And that's the rut Community Choice was in when he took over the marketing department.
"We needed to reach the people that don't know about us, that don't know the credit union difference and don't know that there's a better alternative than what they have today, and that's the bank population," he said.
Bergstrom said one way to attract new members is to develop a campaign that would cut through the clutter.
"We were advertising products and rates and things like that, but we were just getting lost in the noise because everybody's doing that," he said. "We needed to break through. We needed to get it out of being part of the noise with something that's engaging, entertaining and positions people to want to learn more."
On April 1, 2015, just five months after he started at Community Choice, Bergstrom oversaw the rollout of a new campaign called "We Found Your Shirt."
The marketing message was that the banks were taking the shirts off their customers' backs with too many fees and high interest rates and that Community Choice would work to get their shirts back by helping them keep more of their hard-earned money because the credit union offered fewer fees and lower interest rates.
The campaign was intentionally launched on April Fool's Day, and included an attention-getting event involving several coffee shops and paid actors milling around without shirts to reinforce the image.
All coffee patrons got a dollar bill attached to a post-it note in the shape of a T-shirt with a message that this was no April Fool's joke and that the dollar was theirs to keep. The note also encouraged the coffee drinkers to stop by a Community Choice branch to find out how the credit union difference could get the shirt back that they lost to the bank. Those that walked into a branch received a T-shirt.
The event also captured local media coverage and the credit union marketed the campaign through billboards, Pandora, TV, radio, print and digital channels.
"We drove thousands of people into our member centers, we opened thousands of new accounts, and we gave away thousands of T-shirts," Bergstrom said.
In addition to his marketing efforts, Bergstrom developed the credit union's member experience efforts, creating a manager-level position and a cross-function team to identify and fix pain points and map the member journey across all channels by product and member engagement. He also was instrumental in developing Community Choice's social media presence by greatly expanding content development for social media channels and establishing a position within the marketing team to manage the credit union's ranking and ratings within the digital space.
Bergstrom has also been involved with the credit union's smartphone app development, new branch designs and merger strategies.
"My passion and my excitement for what I do is what gets me up in the morning. It keeps me going," he said. "I love what I do. I love the credit union movement. I love Community Choice and the difference that we're truly making in the lives of our members. I just wish I had a bigger soap box, I wish I had a bigger megaphone that I could tell the message or share that message even more."
© 2025 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.
