Banks, Branding and Big Bucks

Banks and promotional products, sittin' in a tree, K-I-S-S-I—OK, maybe that's a bit juvenile. Our apologies if we stirred up any repressed memories of that time in sixth grade when everyone found out about your crush on Suzie Thompkins and totally ruined your life. (Our classmates were so mean.)

What we were attempting to illustrate with the above jingle is this: Banks, perhaps more than any other industry, have made promotional products an integral part of their marketing strategy. They've hitched their proverbial Wells Fargo wagon to logoed products as a primary means of spreading brand awareness—and judging by the 14 Bank of America pens we have around the office and our sudden urge to open a money-market account, it's working.

That's a good thing for distributors, but it also presents some challenges. Banks know what they want, and with larger chains in particular, it can be difficult to get a foot in the door. But we're here to help with a list of tips from the experts, cherry-picked from past issues of Promo Marketing and Print Professional, and that will have you selling to banks faster than you can spell "K-I-S-S-I-N-G."

On Direct Mail
"I have a customer, a bank in Cape May County, New Jersey, that was looking to target businesses in its space for business banking and lending. We came up with a custom-printed box mailer. Inside the box went a custom pail and a lid from, a one-pound bag of local saltwater taffy and a totally customized postcard. The post card was personalized, so it would say 'Dear Joe Smith' on it and not just 'dear generic customer.' And at the bottom, where the digitized signature was, was the person's name from the bank who was going to be calling them. So, Joe Smith got this package, and it was signed by Lana, so Lana is the person that was going to be calling Joe Smith.
"We assembled the box, put the pail in, the taffy in, the lid on top, then this personalized postcard. They were all packaged in shrink-wrap and mailed. We mailed 250, they got appointments with 150 of them. It was tremendous. The whole thing only cost them like 30 bucks a unit."
- Derek Miller, principal of ProPrinters, Trenton, N.J. From "My Best Promotion," Promo Marketing, October 2012.