@Corbin – I didn’t mean that core values = strategy. What I meant was that financial institutions all use the same blueprints… for everything. When everyone’s cooking the same dish using the same recipe, there isn’t going to be a lot of variation in execution — just subtle changes in flavor that will be mostly meaningless.

This, along with one of your previous posts on “Banks: Less differentiated than a bar of soap” highlight the fundamental problem with banks (ahem…and credit unions) from a core branding perspective.

Banking and its counter part, credit union-ing have become commodity businesses. Marketing models, that offered some means to effectively position and differentiate, that once existed for the category have fallen by the way side and been replaced by a sales model. Looking at financial services marketing now it is all about convenience and service.

The problem with that is that if I am use a bank or credit union that has a single branch, and it is next door to my house, it is convenient. And service, well, how do you prove good service? If service was such a driving factor in banking, why don’t more people switch?

The values listed here only go to illustrate the homogenization of the banking industry. Integrity, Teamwork, Excellence, Commitment, Honesty, Respect, Service, Professionalism, Customers, Trust, Community, Loyalty, and Innovation should be applicable to most every kind of business. A hospital, a paper supply company, a construction company, even an exterminator could share these values. As a consumer, I expect businesses I deal with to have these values at their core.

However, what is so bitter with financial services, especially banks in the recent months, is that there are very few that have lived up to these values, as Lucas mentioned above. I know from research, consumers feel lied to, disrespected, and made to feel vulnerable as a result of an industries poor decisions.

Jeffrey, you wrote above, “There’s only so many ways to slice the same strategy.” The problem is, these values do not represent ANY strategy. In fact, because banks are so similar and all use these values (and marketing tactics) these are simply definitions of banks and credit unions as well.

The real problem here is that banks try really really hard to copy each other. This constant imitation enables the market leader to entrench its leadership position more deeply and exacerbates the “vanillaness” of banking as a whole. If you boil it down to the bare minimum, I have no reason to choose a bank, or credit union, beyond convenience (and my own reluctance to switch because there is no real reason to switch).

“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.”

If any publicly traded bank was really focused on something like “integrity” or “community” or “excellence” they’d have to be willing to shrink when competition becomes illogical/unprofitable — and CEOs of publicly traded banks abhor shrinkage like the plague. About the only bank that comes to mind which fits the bill is Westamerica Bancorp run by David Payne…so far, so good for them (they shrank). I’m sure there are a few others like WABC.

But the vast majority of publicly traded banks just plain threw the “values” out the window so that they could keep up with the Jones Bank across the street in a constant effort to meet Wall St earnings expectations.

As it stands now the “integrity” of banks and their mgmts is about zero (like WB and BAC for example), and any traces of “excellence” are invisible (hmm, WB again), and the “community” is getting smoked as a result (like Charlotte).

I’ll be interested to see if your list of buzz words is different for the credit unions…the experience their customers have sure is, different, that is.

(to be fair to WB employees there are a lot of great ones out there, including my banker, but the bank failed)

Hint: advertising for services on your plasma’s or your website won’t cut it.