Your Marketing Team Is Operating Like a Service Desk. Inspire Them to Be Growth Leaders
By Jessica Kendall, Contributor at The Financial Brand
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Devin Teles-Cygnar, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Northwest Bank, believes retail banking marketers need to stop thinking like order takers and start operating as growth leaders. Drawing on a career that spans community banks, super-regionals, analytics, and customer research, Teles-Cygnar argues that challenger thinking matters even inside legacy institutions.
His approach combines customer immersion, disciplined experimentation, and research-led decision-making to modernize a 130-year-old bank without losing customer trust. From reshaping internal culture and redefining marketing’s role to balancing digital convenience with human advice, Teles-Cygnar makes the case that growth depends on staying close to customers and having the conviction to challenge internal assumptions.
Key takeaways: As Teles-Cygnar explained at the 2026 Financial Brand Forum, better marketing starts with better listening, stronger alignment to business outcomes, and a willingness to rethink how decisions get made.
Need to Know:
- Get closer to customers than dashboards allow. Require marketers to regularly visit branches, observe frontline interactions, and listen to customer service calls to understand what customers experience.
- Treat digital and physical channels as complementary. Customers increasingly expect digital convenience, but still want human support when problems arise or major financial decisions are involved.
- Move marketing from service desk to growth engine. Build a clear plan tied to business priorities and measure marketing by its contribution to deposits, customers, and revenue.
- Use research to reduce guesswork. Blend brand health tracking, employee feedback, customer research, and frontline observations to guide decisions.
- Challenge internal friction constructively. Compliance, legal, and organizational resistance should start conversations — not automatically end them.
Break Inertia Through Challenger Thinking and Customer Obsession
Retail banking institutions often inherit decades of habits. Processes become routine, campaigns follow familiar patterns, and teams can default to protecting what worked in the past.
Teles-Cygnar believes growth starts by disrupting that inertia. For him, a challenger mindset is about giving teams permission to test new ideas. That means trying approaches that feel unfamiliar, learning quickly from results, and accepting that not every experiment succeeds.
At Northwest Bank, that mindset became especially important because the organization occupies a middle ground: large enough to have meaningful resources, but not so large that decision-making stalls in layers of governance. Teles-Cygnar sees that size as an advantage. Mid-sized institutions often have room to move faster if leaders are willing to use that flexibility.
Teams need permission to test ideas, evaluate outcomes, and refine quickly. But, that experimentation must start with customer understanding. Teles-Cygnar pushes his team beyond traditional market research by expecting marketers to experience the brand directly:
- Visit financial centers regularly
- Observe how frontline employees interact with customers
- Listen to contact center conversations
- Ask customers directly why they are visiting
Key insight: The goal is to prevent what he calls “ivory tower syndrome,” where marketing decisions become disconnected from customer reality. That said, traditional quantitative and qualitative research still matters. But for Teles-Cygnar, research becomes more valuable when paired with firsthand exposure to customer frustrations, questions, and expectations.
Balance Digital Convenience with Human Advice
One of the strongest assumptions Teles-Cygnar challenges is the belief that digital-first banking automatically means branchless banking. Northwest’s research points in a different direction. Customers increasingly prefer digital channels for transactions, but still want in-person interactions when advice, reassurance, or problem-solving is involved.
Consumers may happily deposit checks on mobile devices or transfer money digitally. But when fraud concerns emerge, financial goals change, or major borrowing decisions arise, many still want face-to-face conversations with someone they trust.
Teles-Cygnar argues that banks make a mistake when they treat branches as relics rather than relationship assets.
The strongest brands in retail banking are not faceless. Their value often becomes tangible through frontline employees who solve problems and build confidence.
Even younger generations complicate assumptions about branch decline. Teles-Cygnar cited research showing that many younger consumers — including Gen Z — still value physical proximity to a financial institution. He recalled hearing a college student describe her relationship with a personal banker in nearly the same language retirees have used for decades.
This creates an important planning challenge: digital experience investments matter, but institutions should avoid treating physical presence as irrelevant. Instead, banks need to rethink the role of branches to focus less on transactions and more on guidance, advice, and relationship-building.
Key insight: Competitive advantage increasingly comes from integrating digital speed for those transactional engagements with human expertise for deeper relationship-building actions.
Make Marketing Accountable for Growth
When Teles-Cygnar joined Northwest five years ago, he encountered a familiar problem: marketing functioned largely as an internal fulfillment team. Business lines requested campaigns. Marketing executed them. Priorities shifted constantly based on immediate business pressures.
Teles-Cygnar calls this the “marketing drive-through window.” His response was simple: close it.
Rather than operating as an on-demand creative department, marketing shifted toward a planned operating model aligned with business goals. Teams developed annual priorities, secured alignment across leadership, and focused most resources on executing agreed-upon objectives.
How this works: The approach introduced discipline without eliminating flexibility. Yes, unexpected market needs still arise and priorities sometimes change. But instead of automatically saying yes to every request, Teles-Cygnar encourages conversations around tradeoffs. If a new priority enters the plan, what gets deprioritized?
That shift changes marketing’s internal role. Instead of reacting to requests, marketers help leaders evaluate business decisions.
Just as importantly, Teles-Cygnar believes marketers must prove business value empirically. Marketing credibility grows when teams can answer difficult questions like:
- What business growth did marketing contribute?
- How did campaigns influence customer acquisition?
- Did stronger brand performance improve lower-funnel efficiency?
Key insight: Teles-Cygnar sees brand investment and performance marketing as complementary rather than competing priorities. In his framing, performance marketing harvests demand while brand building creates it.
Lead With Courage and Curiosity
Finally, one of Teles-Cygnar’ most practical leadership lessons centers on how ideas get evaluated.
Early in his career, he instinctively identified reasons ambitious ideas would fail. Regulations, precedents, internal politics, or operational concerns often narrowed possibilities before ideas had room to develop. Now, he deliberately interrupts that instinct.
When unconventional ideas surface, he looks first for reasons they might work. That mindset influenced Northwest’s recent market expansion into Columbus, where the bank launched an immersive brand experience designed to introduceNorthwest in an unfamiliar market. Rather than traditional branch promotion, the initiative emphasized interaction, storytelling, and customer engagement.
The concept required internal debate, especially around compliance and regulatory interpretation. Teles-Cygnar’ approach was collaborative but firm: challenge assumptions, discuss concerns, and work toward solutions rather than accepting immediate rejection.
Bottom line: Courage matters, but so does constructive dialogue. Innovation rarely survives when teams treat internal objections as permanent endpoints. Sometimes the strongest signal that an idea deserves more attention is discomfort itself. Instead of dismissing unfamiliar ideas immediately, Teles-Cygnar encourages leaders to use friction as a cue to investigate further. In banking, that mindset may matter more than ever.
