utah.bank 8 By Neal Reynolds, President, BankMarketingCenter.com What do bananas and baking soda have to do with bank marketing? I thought you would never ask. Let’s start with the bananas. If I were to hold up a bunch of bananas and ask an audience what they were, most would probably agree they were bananas. But if I held up a green banana and asked the same audience how many would buy this particular banana, less than half would raise their hands. And if I held up a banana that had already turned dark, even fewer would probably want to buy this banana. As you can see, we are not really selling bananas! We are selling banana skins. People buy bananas based on how the banana skin looks. In light of this fact, a smart produce manager would market bananas in different ways, understanding that some people prefer ripe bananas while others prefer green or darker bananas. Perhaps he could market the dark bananas alongside recipes for banana pudding and even place them next to the vanilla wafers. Maybe he could even add a headline like, “Ready for Grandma’s Banana Pudding?” He might market the green bananas to folks heading out on vacation, with a headline like, “Traveling Bananas — they’ll be ripe when you get there!” A good marketer can take a product that many people think of as one thing and sell it in different ways. Now let’s talk about baking soda. This is a product that has been around for over BANANAS, BAKING SODA, AND BANK MARKETING a hundred years, and there are thousands of ways to use it. A good marketer might list some of these many uses on the side of the package. You can brush your teeth with it, put it in cat litter to eliminate odors, clean pots and pans with it, eliminate odors in the refrigerator, use it as an antacid, polish silver with it, or even clean batteries. That’s how baking soda was marketed for years. Then, one day a very smart marketer decided that he would put this same baking soda in a box with “FridgeN-Freezer” on the front alongside a tagline that read, “30 days of freshness in every box.” He also decided to charge $.10 more per box. And guess what? People started paying $.10 more per box just to have a picture of a refrigerator on the front of the packaging! Then this very smart marketer decided that if people would pay more to have a picture of a refrigerator on the front of the box, they might pay even more to have a picture of a cat on the front. After all, people spend millions of dollars each year on their pets. They put a picture of a cat on the front of the box, advertising it as “Cat Litter Deodorizer” with “Activated Baking Soda” and starting charging over one dollar more per box! (I love the tagline “Activated Baking Soda.” I wonder who would buy nonactivated baking soda? I guess people are willing to pay more for their baking soda to be activated!) This proved to be so successful that before you knew it, baking soda was in every aisle of the grocery store with many different product names and profit margins 10 times that of the old-fashioned baking soda in the plain old box. This brings us to banking. I’m sure you are wondering: what do green bananas and baking soda have to do with banking? Well, they have everything to do with banking! For hundreds of years, banks
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