LYNCHBURG, Va. - How many times have you raved about a commercial you saw on television or heard on the radio and commended the clever copy or creative art? How many times have you had difficulty recalling what product was being marketed? The Virginia Credit Union League found itself in just that position. For many years, the league conducted a "Publications Contest" among its credit unions that judged their statement stuffers, brochures, newsletters and annual reports. The problem, explained Donna St. Clair, vice president of public relations and communications for the league, was that, "just because something is `pretty' doesn't mean it's effective. The Publications Contest included no means for measuring whether something actually worked or not. What good is a slick statement stuffer that doesn't yield one more loan? "The judging of the Publications Contest focused more on the technical skills of marketers instead of their strategic abilities," St. Clair continued. "The contest afforded no opportunity for sharing of knowledge. This was one of the most disconcerting aspects of the contest. After hours and hours of work, we would set up a display room at the league's Annual Meeting. It was like a morgue, no one but the winners even entered the door and they did so only to pick up their award certificates. "If you stop and think about it, if you're going to have a contest like this in a cooperative movement like credit unions, wouldn't you want there to be some cooperative gain?" St. Clair asked. It was time to totally revamp the marketing competition from ground zero. After the league's 1999 Annual Meeting, St. Clair single-handed "pulled the respirator" from the Publications Contest. In its place, she launched the league's new Maximum MarketingT Program. Maximum Marketing spotlights how well a credit union can think through a problem and execute a strategy, rather than merely looking at the sexiness of a brochure or newsletter, she explained. "Sexy is meaningless if the people whose attention you're trying to capture can't remember the product or the message you're conveying. "The problem with looking at marketing as being merely a brochure or newsletter is that it comes to be seen as the responsibility of the marketing department," St. Clair said. "Good marketing is an organizational endeavor, it's an entire credit union's effort." The league received about a dozen applications for its first Maximum Marketing competition. Marketers who participated were asked to write and submit a narrative about their project, addressing four key elements: defining the problem/opportunity; developing the solution; executing the plan; measuring the outcome. While applicants were allowed to include a narrative description of their marketing piece, they were not permitted to include with their application a hardcopy of their entry. Entries were assigned a numeric code to maintain anonymity and eliminate the possibility of favoritism by the contest judges. Credit unions were also instructed not to refer to their names in their marketing entries. Each entry was scored on a 100-point basis in the four categories and entries in the competition were grouped into four asset sizes - under $5 million; $5 million - under $20 million; $20 million - under $100 million; $100 million and above. Measuring the outcome of the marketing piece was one of the most challenging categories applicants had to deal with, St. Clair said. The idea of measuring the effectiveness of a marketing piece typically draws a blank, she remarked. "Marketing is a skill set that requires a balance between the right and left sides of the brain. Credit union marketers usually think of measuring the effectiveness of a marketing piece in terms of hard numbers, like how many loans did the promotion pull in. But there are other ways to measure how effective a marketing piece is. Anecdotal evidence, for example, can be just as useful." Kim Wilkerson, vice president of marketing for Central Virginia FCU and one of the winners of this year's Maximum Marketing competition offered that one of the problems credit union marketers frequently make is they tend to run promotions out of habit at certain times of the year - "It's spring, time to do an auto loan promotion!" - and not because their credit union's numbers tell them they need to attract members' loan dollars in a particular area or increase savings deposits. "You need to first crunch the numbers, listen to what your members are asking for, look at what's happening in the economy before you run any kind of promotion," says Wilkerson. As for the Virginia Credit Union League's new Maximum Marketing program, Wilkerson is all for it. "Anyone can go to an advertising agency and pay lots of money to have something fancy created to enter in a marketing competition," she says. "It's more important though for marketers to be able to show how they defined the problem and the solution. It shows they understood what was needed." -
ekingoff@cutimes.com
