Existing companies already have a brand – whether they’ve deliberately crafted that brand or not. While many financial institutions have weak and/or undifferentiated brands, there are usually aspects of that brand (albeit sometimes small and difficult to identify) that can be leveraged as points of differentiation.

I think Rob’s example highlights an important point Jeffry made about the outside-in approach: “With this approach, you first identify a focused audience segment.” The focused audience segment isn’t always current customers or members – as it’s unlikely that Rob’s 53-year-old members would have given his team the idea to create Spike the spokes-dog. Rather than tapping your entire customer/member base for input, the ‘focused audience segment’ should be your desired target – who do you want to serve? And this segment should be as specific as possible. It sounds like Rob’s CU was able to get that information from the younger employee base.

It’s also good to hear Rob talk about the length of time it has taken USA Fed CU in its rebranding effort – as it’s not something that can happen quickly if it’s done right.

In 2007 we made a significant shift in brand by adopting a straight talk approach to emphasize our differences from banks and we even adopted a spokes dog, Spike. Our goal was to grow organic (non-indirect) members and drive down the average age that stood at 53. In two years we have seen modest increases in net member growth and the average has dropped to 42. In addition, new members are increasingly organic and overall product usage is going up.

Our success with the new brand is not what makes our story interesting. What is interesting is that it has taken two years to roll out this brand and for the most part it remains an inside-out approach. Financially we could not have done it any quicker and our older membership was not providing feedback that would appeal to a younger consumer. So we took and unconventional approach – we built the brand from the inside-out starting with our culture. Our internal slogan became “Friends, Fun, and Money” and the first place Spike and his friends– the low rate duck, savings squirrel, and checking chicken – showed up was through merchandising at our HQ building that does not have branch. Our employees, who are younger, immediately embraced Spike and the new brand. They took responsibility for driving our culture and the result has been changes in dress code, fun events for employees and even a weekly bring your dog to work day. The creative energy of our staff has not only made this process fun, but also has contributed to the development of the brand.

As I reflect on it, we really took a hybrid approach using our staff as our focus group and through this process gained their buy-in and feedback to reach the desired target market. Now we need to build on the success of this new brand by adopting a full-on outside-in approach to engage the membership the same way we have our employees.