HICKORY, N.C.-Fittingly for the Halloween season, Carolina Postal CU here is seeing great success with a zombie-themed promotion.
According to VP of Marketing Deb McLean, the credit union has worked in the past with a Texas-based agency that pitched the cooperative campaign to a number of CUs (more than a dozen nationwide are participating in some fashion). The ad strategy is built around the idea that consumers will need a working automobile to escape zombie attacks, and uses CPCU's existing rates (as low as 2.99%). The promotion applies to both new and used cars, as well as re-fis.
What made the promotion a blockbuster for Carolina Postal was its participation in a local Octoberfest celebration. The $80-million, 8,900-member credit union serves postal employees throughout the state, but has a community charter in Catawba County. "I can't wander through postal facilities dressed as a zombie," said McLean, but CEO Joy Watts was on-board with having local students dress up and zombies and swarm the Octoberfest celebration.
CPCU set up its own "Zombie Free Zone" at the festival, where guests could register to win an emergency car kit-after all, said McLean, if your car breaks down during a zombie attack, you'll need to be able to fix it quickly and get back on the road. During the three-day event more than 300 people registered for the contest-providing names and e-mail addresses-and McLean said that at least 100 said they were interested in joining a credit union because of new fees being charged by the big banks. "Because of the whole debit card situation with Bank of America, people got very excited to talk with us," she said.
What made the event especially memorable, said McLean, was that all of the local Wachovia branches were converted to Wells Fargo branches just before the festival, so Wells Fargo was on hand to promote the brand. "They were handing out stuff left and right and they had the Wells Fargo Stagecoach there, and our zombies kept swarming it," said McLean. "The Wells Fargo workers that were there kept laughing because they didn't realize we were a credit union."
Zombie Leads
The CU is following up with all "zombie leads" from both the festival and the website, and McLean said that six or seven leads come in every day from the website and other e-mail blasts. The promo will run through the end of October, and CPCU staff will dress up as zombies on Halloween as part of the celebration.
For more info: cusurvive.com; cusurvive.com/cpcu. For more photos of CPCU's zombie-related activities at Octoberfest visit the credit union's
