Watch the Brand Drift: 3 Ways Credit Unions Drift & How to Avoid It

No one suddenly wakes up with a bad brand. For many credit unions, an ineffective brand happens over years. Often years of neglect. Just like no captain intends to drift off course, it happens.

If you’ve ever been SCUBA diving, you know how dangerous drifting is. You can suddenly come up for air and realize you are a long way from the shore or a boat. Why? Because you’ve drifted.

As author David Cottrell says in his book “Destination: Success!”: “Drifting will not lead me to where I want to go.” And drifting will not lead your credit union’s brand where it needs to go. Cottrell notes that there are doers and drifters. Doers have a purpose and a mission while drifters allow external circumstances to determine their next move.

It is the same for credit unions: You can either proactively do something with your brand or you can reactively drift.

So how do you know if your brand is drifting? Here three ways credit union brands drift and how to avoid that drift.

Internal Navigation System Is Off

Proverbs says, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” I would suggest where this is no brand vision, the credit union perishes (or certainly drifts). You must answer questions like:

• What makes your credit union different (without the words people, community or service)?
• Are our values clear to our employees?
• Do our mission and vision statements confuse our employees? Do they even know them?

StoryBrand CEO Donald Miller notes, “When you confuse, you lose.” Any level of brand confusion among your employees threatens your internal navigation system. The biggest threats to your brand actually come from within.

In other words, one reason your brand is drifting is because your employees are disengaged with your values. According to Gallup, only 23% of U.S. employees strongly agree that they can apply their organization’s values to their work every day; only 27% strongly agree that they “believe in” their organization’s values.

To avoid the drift, your employees must see the correlation between your brand and their day-to-day job.

Strategic solution to avoid internal navigation causing drift: Operationalize your brand. That means training (beyond the first day orientation) your staff on your brand. Implement a member experience program that focuses on brand standards.

External Storms Are Rising

You may have a clear vision, an engaged staff and a unique message. Yet even with those strong elements in place, you can still drift. Why? Because things outside your brand boat cause crashing waves.

External factors causing brand drift include a new charter, a new field of membership or even economic headwinds in your local community. In other words, outside circumstances or changes could lead to drift. Anytime you are entering a new market, building a new branch, or merging another credit union into yours you must examine your brand to ensure it still resonates. Or it will drift.

The biggest external factor to examine are your financial numbers. You may not have a loan growth problem, a deposit challenge or a new member slowdown. All those could indicate you actually have a brand that is drifting. It may no longer be connecting your new audiences.

Marketing and consumers are moving and changing at an incredibly fast pace today. Your brand must learn to pivot quickly with those external factors.

Strategic solution to avoid external storms causing drift: Review your strategic plan to ensure your brand matches those objectives. During every planning session examine how strong (or weak) your brand is.

Your Boat Needs Painting (Your Brand Visuals Look Outdated)

Even if you know where you’re going and you’re managing external storms, your brand can still drift. Why? Because no one notices it. And one reason why consumers don’t see you is because your creative visuals look just like every other financial institution in your area.

As Wharton School professor and author Jonah Berger eloquently puts it, “nobody talks about boring companies, boring products or boring ads.”

Consider these stats:

• Companies with well-designed logos are estimated to experience revenue growth of up to 33% (Source: Forbes);
• 75% of consumers judge a brand’s credibility based on its logo design (Source: Stanford Graduate School of Business);
• Brands with recognizable logos are 58% more likely to perform well in the stock market (Source: The Logo Company); and
• 94% of first impressions about a brand are logo related (Source: The Logo Company).

Sometimes credit unions don’t know if their visuals, logos and messaging are outdated. We are too close to own marketing. Those marketing blind spots need exposure by simply having someone else review your marketing for freshness.

Strategic solution to avoid bad visuals causing drift: Conduct a marketing and brand assessment. Have an unbiased third party review your brand to tell you where the good, the bad and the ugly is.

Branding takes intentionality. But as a Chinese proverb says, “good intentions don’t cook the rice.” In other words, you must take action with your brand. A good brand doesn’t just happen by osmosis. If you don’t invest in your brand, your brand will drift.

Mark Arnold is founder and president of On the Mark Strategies, a Dallas, Texas-based consulting firm specializing in branding and strategic planning for credit unions.