Written by John Remsen.
As a former community bank president who was also an agency owner and marketing director, I have some first hand insight to share about building a strong working relationship with your boss.
Use Your Tool Kit!
Marketing people in today’s community bank have the “tool kit” at hand to build respect and confidence with their bank’s CEO, other senior managers and the entire bank team. It may seem simple, but it works.
T = Talk It is imperative to have open dialogue with your CEO and management team about where the bank is going. Make sure you educate the bank’s leadership that marketing is much more than the ads, events and selling efforts of the bank. You must address management to be sure your bank is offering the right products, at the right price, with the right placement (delivery method). Promoting effectively is and always has been marketing. The four “P’s” of marketing must be part of your interaction and education process of the bank as a whole. If you have not done so, remind your team regularly that “Marketing is Everyone’s Job!” and how they play a role in each of the “P’s”.
O = Organize If you are not well organized as a bank marketer today you will not succeed. Make sure you can always answer the 3 part question that most CEO’s ask: “How will much will it cost to get it done, who will do it and how can we measure it?” An accounting professor of mine once said something that has stayed with me for my entire working career:
“Management gets what it measures and very little else!”
Think about this on a daily basis and you will win with the CEO. Always be organized for success in the catalyst role effective bank marketers must play.
O = Opportunity Is your bank going to lead or follow? Today you must be quick to see the opportunity to lead and go for it. Last fall’s debit card fee fiasco was a real opportunity for community banks to jump out in front of big bank competition. Did you seize this opportunity? Are you just looking at social media, or actually doing something with it? Most importantly, has your bank taken a fresh look at its brand? If not, are you carrying out the critical discovery process to build brand equity for the future?
L = Listen Seems so simple to say, but in community banks today there is still not much listening going on. You need to listen to your customers on a regular basis. Today there is no excuse for not knowing what your customers and the public are saying and thinking about your bank. Not on Facebook? Why not? A critical part of building and maintaining your bank’s brand will be input from the bank team, your customers, and the public. You may be surprised with the findings. Surprised or not, you will have a clear platform on which to build success.
So, bank marketers, resolve to use your TOOL KIT in 2012 and ongoing. You will find by taking these tools out on a daily basis, you will have great success in the critical role you play in building your community bank.
Every other month, we take the time to meet for a team building event to shake up our normal routines, get our creativity flowing, and give us the opportunity to see different sides of the people that we work with every day.
Yesterday, we met in the FMS conference room for a delicious lunch catered by Mellow Mushroom. After we were stuffed full of pizza, salad, and the sweetest pretzels you could imagine, it was time to get down to business. That’s when we pulled out Cranium.
If you’ve never played Cranium, I highly recommend it for your next game night or even your own team building events. All the players split into teams and take turns as they make their way around the game board. At each stop, there are four categories of cards which dictate how your team can move forward. Some cards will give you a trivia-style multiple choice question, others will ask you to spell a word backwards, and still others will ask you to get your teammates to guess an object by acting it out, drawing it, or sculpting it with clay. It’s a high energy game that quickly brings out the ridiculous side of everyone.
To say that the FMS team is competitive would be an understatement. During our game, there was a fair amount of friendly trash talking, rule-checking, and timing down to the second. As the red team gradually overtook the blue team for first place, while the yellow team consoled themselves with the fact that creativity cannot be rushed, we had a great time pushing each other to be increasingly outrageous, laughing the whole way.
The best part of today’s game was watching the other teams compete. Amber turned bright red as she acted out ‘bra shopping’ for her team. The yellow team concentrated so hard on spelling ‘nincompoop’ backwards that it was comical. Everyone cracked up as Bill drew the bushiest mustache you’ve ever seen. And we all listened intently as our respective teammates hummed the Indiana Jones theme song, desperately hoping that we would be the first team to correctly identify it. We also discovered some hidden talents in our teammates. Zach, for example, can do a spot-on impression of Angelina Jolie. Amber can draw just as well with her eyes closed as she can with them open. And Nick can sculpt a cheerleader, complete with pom-poms, just from clay.
If you think that your company has too much to do to spend time on team-building, think again. Breaking up the routine is crucial in industries such as ours that rely on creativity, interactivity, and fresh, new perspectives, which becomes well worth the investment. As we gathered today, we were reminded of the many unusual talents that the FMS team possesses. The game break was a nice, energetic change of pace during a stressful time and reminded us that no matter how busy we are, at least we’ll be able to think back to the time that we saw our CEO impersonating a zombie – and that, undoubtedly, will make us smile.
Watch the video to see Tim attempt to get his team to guess the word “band-aid” by sculpting and acting it out with clay.
Can you imagine yourself as a turtle? An object? A person of a different nationality? A fictitious character? A version of you in a completely different climate? What would you look like? What characteristics would make it clearly you? Now … imagine you have to mold this image into clay. That’s the task we were challenged with in this month’s Creative Caffeine session at FMS.
Leading the session was Nick Long, the agency’s design director and a longtime artist whose focus is on contemporary realism. While many of us who gathered together have creative roles here at the agency, I can tell you that molding clay is not necessarily our forte. Nick implied that no experience was necessary for the task, and that the point was to express our creativity in a different medium than we traditionally use, like the trusty pen and paper, or computer programs.
Nick proceeded to show us some impressive clay figures created by his son when he was very young. Several of us were thinking, and Amber shared, “Nick, you could have shown those to us after we’re done.” He told us there was only one rule: to create some kind of version or alter ego of ourselves. How it manifested was up to us. With a spread of clay and utensils before us, not to mention our vivid imaginations, we began tearing pieces off, shaping them and bringing our creations to life.
The Creative Caffeine group working diligently on their individual claymations.
A little time later, the focused silence lifted and we looked around in amazement at all of the unique claymations (see pictures below). It was great fun breaking out of our typical routines to create in a different way. We walked away with a refreshed perspective on being creative, and the energy resulting from the experience spread throughout the agency. No matter what your challenge—whether it be creating an ad, a website or some kind of guerilla marketing—the boundaries of creativity are only as confined as we make them.
Nick created a claymation of himself somewhere in the cold. He is all bundled up!
Laurie created our very own FMS mascot!
Bill created a neat little character that represented him when he was growing up - big ears, fro in high school, washboard abs, and no arms intentionally (because he said he wasn't perfect, but he really is!)
Amber created "Super Amber." Enough said.
As our copywriter, Jen created an erasable pen with characteristics that reflected her own personality - red hair, green eyes, Florida Gator color, and a little sass/personality reflected her her arms.