Financial institutions should try to develop their own "master" brand rather than one that's focused only on individual products or services, says Debbie DeGabrielle, chief marketing officer for Belleview, Wash.-based Intelligent Results Inc.

During a Jan. 17 teleconference entitled "Improve Customer Experience and Build Brand Loyalty," DeGabrielle outlined the different kinds of brands that companies might develop and underscored the importance of making better use of data to help support that effort.

While building a marketing strategy based on promoting individual products might seem the most straightforward path, DeGabrielle cautioned that this approach is fraught with risk, particularly for banks that should want to engender loyalty to more than one product or service. "To engage the market by individual products is a sure recipe for failure," said DeGabrielle.

In general, a financial institution's best bet is to pursue a "master brand" strategy so that customers will develop an affinity for the overall company, DeGabrielle said. Further, banks need to determine what kind of attributes they want consumers to associate with their institution, she added.

For example, DeGabrielle said that Wells Fargo & Co.'s brand is strongly associated with service while ING Direct is typically linked with low pricing and convenience.

DeGabrielle said building a brand becomes a "complex task" because it plays such a critical role in influencing customers and is also affected by them. "Customers get to define your brand," she said.

According to DeGabrielle, the four key "brand architectures" that define most companies are:

• The "Master Brand," where a company is typically identified with one kind of product or service and may pour millions of dollars across multiple channels into supporting that brand. Examples include McDonald's Corp., Nike Inc. and IBM Corp.
  
  
• The "Product Brand," where the company makes no effort to link several well-known brands in different areas. A prime example cited by DeGarielle is Procter & Gamble. She noted that no one associates Iams dog food with Pepto Bismol, yet both are marketed by P&G.
  
  
• The "Endorser Brand," where a company or organization creates an overarching favorable impression or feeling through its marketing efforts that customers then link to its products or services. An example of this would be Pillsbury and its cuddly "Dough Boy," DeGabrielle said.
  
  
• The "Source Brand," where each product is marketed to create an impression that "accrues back to the parent company, hastening the adoption of further products," DeGabrielle said. This type of brand marketing is most often used by software or technology companies such as Microsoft, she added.

(For more on bank branding campaigns, see "Behind the Scenes of Wamu's 'Gutsy' Campaign" in the May 10, 2006 issue of BAI's Banking Strategies Retail Delivery Insights and "Customer Satisfaction and Commitment? J.D. Power and ACSI Rank the Banks" in the March 1, 2006 issue.)

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