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Sense and Respond Marketing
Personal financial managers, key member experiences, and blogs may help credit union marketers identify and address member needs in real time.

By Lisa Hochgraf

May 16, 2008

During his presentation this week at CUES Experience in Minneapolis, Ron Shevlin said it's important for today's marketers to sense member needs and respond to them in real time. Senior analyst for Aite Group, Boston, Shevlin identified some key things marketers can do in this regard.

As an example of a way credit union marketers can start serving members' needs right away, Shevlin cited "the unrealized potential of personal financial managers," such as Wesabe and Jwaala.

To date, personal financial management software like this has just been for tracking money, Shevlin said, but "people don't want to track their money." In the long term, PFMs will also help consumers make decisions about their money. As this happens, good PFMs will gain people's confidence so they are willing to share their financial data.

Shevlin predicted that PFM usage will grow. Credit unions targeting members of Gen Y may be particularly interested in PFMs as a way to do sense and respond marketing because young people today are more involved with—and willing to share—their financial lives than many previous generations, he asserted. And over time, companies with successful PFM technology may become ready to partner with credit unions.

Shevlin shared a quote from Larry Huston, former VP/innovation at Procter & Gamble, that helps to illustrate the emotion people have when choosing and purchasing products:

Morris Partee facilitates the after-offsite-visit for event attendees who went to Pixel Farm Interactive. Partee is chief experience officer for everythingcu.com.

"Successful brands have a story that consumers tell themselves when they reach for the product in the store to buy it."

"When that mother goes to buy that box of cereal, there's a story that's going on inside her head," Shevlin said. "It's not necessarily a story from P&G that she saw in an ad, but there's a story."

Consumers "don't necessarily tell you that story, because sometimes that's subconscious," he continued. "The critical aspect about marketing moving forward is, 'Where are these stories coming from?' It comes from their experiences. It doesn't come from the one time that Joe (the member service rep) calls up and says, 'I want to sell you more products.'"

Shevlin cited another quote to illustrate the point. This one is from John Gottman, executive director of the Relationship Research Institute:

"Good relationships aren't about clear communication—they're about small moments of attachment and intimacy."

Sense and respond marketing depends on such unexpected moments, Shevlin said. "You can't predict those things."

But you can create environments in which such moments might happen. Shevlin advocated using social media for this purpose.

"I think the biggest potential here lies in blogs," he noted. "I think this is where opportunity lies to have communication and dialogs with members."

He offered several questions to ask yourself if you're thinking about creating conversations with your CU's members using blogs:

• Who else is doing it?
• Are your competitors in your marketplace doing it?
• What results have you achieved?
• How will you deal with negative comments?
• Who's going to write blog entries?
• What are you going to write about and how often?
• What will you stop doing in order to blog?
• How will you know if you've been successful?
• How does it fit with your acquisition/retention efforts?
• Is there a strategy behind all this?

"This is not about 'What's our blogging strategy,' but 'What's our business strategy, what's our marketing strategy and how might blogging fit into that?'"

If you're going to blog, Shevlin suggests making sure you:

Sign the entries—People want to know who's doing this

Use pictures of your bloggers—Verity Credit Union's "Our Voices" blog uses kids pictures and then the bond of meeting the adult can be formed; research suggests that trust comes from seeing pictures, Shevlin noted.

Post your comments policy—Are you going to moderate the comments to your blog or let people post their thoughts live? "Whatever you decide is your choice, but put it up there," he suggested.

Categorize your posts—Over time it will help people find things.

Don't do commercials—This is the place for conversations.

Be comment-worthy—"When you look at a lot of CU blogs today, the comments are from other CU industry bloggers, not from members," Shevlin said. "Why is that? If you put up a post, 'Here's Five Great Reasons Why You Should be Saving,' people are going to be say, OK, great," and move on." Try to be creative about ways to engage your members.

Shevlin said it will take some rethinking and retraining to get your marketing team moving in this new direction of "sense and respond."

"As you think about building new marketing competencies, think about how this (approach) plays into serving your membership base better."

Lisa Hochgraf is a CUES editor.

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