Park Bank in Milwaukee is encouraging its employees to just say yes.
Eager to boost cross-sell ratios and tune up service, the $617 million-asset bank has started a “Driven by Yes” branding campaign.
That tag line now appears in all of Park’s marketing materials and is prominently featured on its redesigned Web site. The message, said Park chief executive P. Michael Mahoney, is that regardless of the business lines they represent, Park employees will be more attentive to customers.
“Every single customer is a customer of every single employee of the bank,” Mr. Mahoney said.
The bank spent roughly a year researching and developing the tag line, which it unveiled in March. And though there are no assurances that the rebranding will generate the double-digit earnings growth Park is shooting for, other banks have had a fair amount of success with similar campaign themes.
Selling more products to existing customers is a big part of the initiative. Though Mr. Mahoney would not disclose the bank’s cross-sell ratios, he said it would track them closely to measure the rebranding effort’s effectiveness.
Park also hopes to increase net income by about 10% a year. It achieved that goal in 2004 after uneven results in previous years — net income fell 1.5% in 2003 and was well short of the 10% growth target in 2002 and 2000.
Of course, Park employees were not ignoring customers before the rebranding. But surveys showed that there was room for improvement, and Mr. Mahoney, who is also Park’s president and chairman, said he had been seeing signs that silos were forming.
For example, if someone was referred from lending to cash management, the cash management people tended to regard the customer as the lenders’ customer rather than the bank’s, Mr. Mahoney said.
Those attitudes have changed, he said. For instance, a former loan processor who has moved to another department stepped in and processed a loan after the bank had closed for the day because the current loan processor had gone home. If he had not stepped in, Mr. Mahoney said, the customer would have had to wait another day for the loan to close.
Peter Soraparu, the executive director of external relations at the Bank Administration Institute in Chicago, said Park’s campaign could help dispel the perception that banks prefer to say no.
“There is an old saying that banks are never really willing to lend you money when you need it,” Mr. Soraparu said. “Reinforcing the fact that banks say yes to their customers is probably a good thing.”
Other banks apparently feel that way.
The $320 billion-asset Washington Mutual Inc. of Seattle uses “The Power of Yes” slogan in its marketing, while the $32 billion-asset Commerce Bancorp Inc. of Cherry Hill, N.J., is calling itself “the Yes Bank” and uses the word yes in the phone numbers customers call to apply for loans.
The $846 million-asset FNB Corp. of Asheboro, N.C., refers to its branches as “Yes! Bank” offices and uses the slogan, “Yes you can. Yes we can.”
Park did a one-month phase-in of its tag line with employees before taking it public, holding training sessions on the brand’s practical meaning. Mr. Mahoney said he expects that some time in department meetings will be spent discussing how to live up to “Driven by Yes.”
Mr. Soraparu cautioned that a new slogan will not guarantee success.
“The brand itself won’t do it,” he said. “What it is going to take is a commitment on the bank staff’s part to determine what their customers’ needs are and how to meet them.”
