The following marketing self-audit was submitted by Richard H. Tubbs Jr., president of New Marketing Directions in Gaithersburg, Md.
1. Do you have any competition?
2. Have you had any large setbacks due to a large turnaround in any of your community's three leading industries?
3. Do you know which products or services contributed the most to your growth last year?
4. Do you know, within five points, what percentage of your market is:
a) Empty-nest households?
b) Mature parents with college expenses?
c) Earning $25,000 or more annually? $40,000?
d) At present using an equity loan?
5. For each category above, do you know what services this segment of the market will need over the next five years?
6. If you answered "yes" to questions 4 and/or 5, do these figures come from sales reps or chambers of commerce?
7.When you meet, socially, with a prominent local businessman (or woman), do you know the last date when you offered a specific product or service to that business?
8. Are you just thinking about branches, just starting to use branches, or uncertain about whether your branches are really contributing to profitability?
9. Are you thinking about adding any new services or products?
10. Do you have any bad news about operations that might arouse the interest of the local press?
11. Do you receive letters of praise from customers on a regular basis?
12. Has a customer ever complimented a bank employee for selling him or her an extra service?
13. Within one point, do you know what percentage of your present customers bank with you, at least in part, because of something you did in the community?
How to Score Yourself
If you answered "yes" to questions 1,2,6,8,9, or 10, score five points each
If you answered "no" to questions 3,4,5,7,11,12, or 13, score five points each.
If you answered "no" to the first two questions, you can probably survive very nicely with little marketing help.
But if you answered "yes" to either of the first two questions and scored more than 20 points on the self-audit, Mr. Tubbs says, your bank's marketing department needs work.
This is, of course, where Mr. Tubbs hopes he can be of value.
For he offers a part-time service to which banks can outsource marketing just as they outsource other operations.
What he hopes is that companies like his can serve as the marketers for banks too small to afford entire departments but too big to ignore professional marketing altogether.
He explains:
"We're not talking, here, about ordering specialities, or getting a weekly ad to the local paper ... we're talking about someone who can make sense out of research data, draw a plan for obtaining more sales at a cost below the top of the market, analyze all of the factors in a branch, and advise you on the best alternative out of several very different options.
"We're talking about someone ... you can ask for advice on saleability of a product or service before you go to the trouble of installing it. We're also talking about a part-timer. Until you're at least in the $500 miilion range in assets, you probably can't afford to have someone like that sitting around the building all day.
"A good, basic, small community bank advisory service ... shouldn't require more than 2 1/2 hours per month ... In that time, the firm should be able to provide you strategic guidance, two or three promotional plans, an ad agency review, staff sales and service training, and some customer input that will help to further refine what you're offering."
Mr. Nadler is a contributing editor of American Banker and professor of finance at the Rutgers University Graduate School of Management.
