GREENWOOD VILLAGE, Colo. - The second half of 2008 should look much like the first half when it comes to mergers among credit unions. What’s important at any time, one company is reminding, is that when a merger calls for a name change, the credit unions need to be careful about giving up existing brand equity and ensuring the new name means something to members and the community.
Jim Schneider, CEO of Schneider Sales Management here, believes the economy will only prompt more consolidations, and many credit unions are opting for names that “lose the essence of who they are. I am seeing a lot of names that sound high-tech,” he said. “Some of these names are really losing what the credit unions are trying to be in the marketplace. Credit unions are supposed to be the relationship-oriented organizations. I think some of these techy names work against them.”
Coming up with a fictitious example to illustrate his point, Schneider said it would be like a CU serving a steel company changing its name to ComCor.
“These are the type of names that popped up during the dot-com era,” Schneider contends. “You never really knew what the company did.”
Schneider believes the weak economy has more CUs thinking about merger to survive, quickening the pace of consolidation and even decisions on names.
“What I see a lot of credit unions doing now is paying big money to have some branding company come in and give them a new name,” he suggested. “I think they often waste money by trying to be too different. They should build off the names they had, which made sense in the marketplace. It might sound a little limiting to the credit union to still be tied to their FOM, but I think that they can change their old name, tie it to their past, and still change it to have broader acceptance.”
When credit unions consolidate, Schneider said many wait too long to get the new entity operating at full capacity. “They tend to leave both organizations the same for a while, afraid to integrate cultures too quickly,” he said. “They need to understand they made an investment in the merger and should be moving to have it pay off quickly. For example, why wouldn’t they immediately have the same sales expectations for the new organization as they did their old ones? Why would you wait a year with a soft culture?”
Schneider Sales Management is a national sales training and sales management consulting firm.
For more info: www.schneidersales.com.
