When consumers go through mergers, DeSalvo said, there are a lot of pain points they experience such as the potential for higher fees, branch closings and employee layoffs. What's more, bank customers may feel somewhat disenfranchised after their small community bank consolidates with a large regional or national bank that comes with a corporate, button-down attitude, and mediocre or impersonal service.

"So we thought this was a good opportunity to really differentiate Truliant, create a heightened awareness and hopefully attract some of those [bank] consumers," DeSalvo said.

In its targeted print and digital marketing messages, the cooperative has focused on the fact that because it is owned by members, Truliant is driven to serve members' interests first, unlike banks — owned by shareholders — that are driven by profits before customers.

"When a bank merges and merges, how do you know what it stands for?" reads one of Truliant's print ads. "At Truliant, we stand for our members. And by the way, yes, you can become a member."

DeSalvo said a branch manager reported a consumer brought in the newspaper ad and said, "'My current bank has merged twice. I'm tired of it. I saw your ad. I'm interested. I want to learn more.'"

After hearing Truliant's pitch, he transferred all of his bank accounts to the credit union.

"We were actually able to save him a couple hundred dollars per month on his loans by refinancing them," she said.

To determine how to deliver its targeted marketing messages, Truliant first mapped out the locations of the bank branches that could be affected by the mergers and where they overlapped with Truliant's branches.

"When there are bank mergers there are usually some branch closings, so we wanted to see where they overlapped with our branches," DeSalvo explained. "So we mapped the bank branches and then we mapped out our branches. Then we basically drew a three to five mile radius around the Truliant branches that are in the areas of the [affected] bank branches to determine the areas that we were going to make sure that our marketing would be targeted to."

The credit union took out display ads in publications and their websites that have high readership levels. Truliant also paid for billboard ads within the targeted radius areas of a Truliant and merged bank branch. Direct mail promotions for specific neighborhoods were also leveraged, as were social media, search word ads, digital display ads and retargeting ads.

Targeting 25- to 45-year-old consumers, Truliant hopes the marketing campaign will attract some bank customers and motivate Truliant members, who may have one or two products with the credit union, to move their entire relationships to the credit union from other banks in the merger pipeline.

DeSalvo expects the marketing campaign will run through the rest of this year and sometime into next year so that it will coincide during the time frames when the merged banks will be converting over to their new systems when bank customers may be more likely to see changes in their fees or when their branches close.

What was surprising to DeSalvo is that soon after the marketing campaign was announced on June 1, seven local media outlets posted articles about Truliant's ad promotion.

"We were pleasantly surprised that so many local papers picked it up, which was a great way to get the word out," she said.

Eva LaMere, president of Hauppauge, N.Y.-based Austin & Williams marketing agency, said that while exploiting local bank mergers is not that novel, promoting that Truliant will never merge does amp up the messaging.

"The greatest opportunity to win new members is to be present at the point [bank customers] are frustrated or disillusioned by their financial institutions," LaMere said. "Mergers count up there as trigger events. It's a smart approach."

She pointed out that for one of Austin & Williams' credit union clients that faced similar bank merger activity in its marketplace, the agency commissioned roving billboards to travel around the merging bank branches.

"At times [the roving billboard] would be parked across the street from the branches as customers exited and entered the branch," LaMere said. "It created lots of buzz."

James Robert Lay, founder and CEO of the Digital Growth Institute (formerly CU Grow) in Houston, said Truliant is doing a great job tapping to the emotional right side of the consumer's brains as they are taking on the role of the helpful guide in an otherwise stressful time for residents in the communities they serve.

"It's good to see Truliant taking the high road as I'm tired of seeing credit unions position around bank bashing," Lay said. "Residents in these communities whose banks have been merged are looking for hope and Truliant's campaign is tapping into the emotional need."

Peter Gwaltney, president of the North Carolina Bankers Association in Raleigh, said he's not concerned about Truliant's marketing strategy because it's nothing he hasn't seen before.

"Aside from all of our other concerns — and we have many — about Truliant and some of the other larger, more aggressive credit unions in North Carolina, this is really not anything new," he said. "This is not an unusual strategy for another financial institution when another organization in the market has sold. I don't see it as necessarily anything unusual for organizations like Truliant. Credit unions are all differentiating themselves as best they can from banks, referring to what they do as banking. They talk about being a better bank. They talk about banking differently. They are using the word bank in every which way, and they want to be everything we are but they don't want to pay the taxes, they don't want to comply with the CRA, and they don't want the same regulations and supervision that banks have."

Gwaltney also expects the consolidation trend of community banks to continue as it will in the credit union industry.

In 2012, North Carolina had nearly 90 credit unions. That number has declined to 72 as of July.

"In our case, shareholders have options. They can invest their money in the bank stock or they can choose other options," he said. "So the banks are under pressure to produce a fair rate of return to the shareholders. They are making very rational decisions [to merge] based on economic forces."