As is always the case, Google had a “doodle” of their logo of for Saint Patrick’s day last week. Google has made it a point to create doodles of their logos for darn near every holiday possible. They even did a doodle to celebrate the 57th anniversary of the patent for a bar-code.

Newegg, a major online electronics retailer, even gets into the holiday spirit with their own customized holiday logo.

So what does all of this mean to credit unions?

Credit unions can stay relevant and fresh with only minor tweaks to your brand.
Your brand is not set in stone. It is not a palette of 3 colors that you must always use.
Take advantage of the Super Bowl, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, and Oscar the Grouch’s birthday.

These “holidays” give a marketer a tremendous amount of material to create new campaigns to entice new members, and existing members, to strength their relationship with the credit union. Run a promotion that makes Oscar the Grouch (aka the CFO) cranky. And pitch it like that.  Don’t forget the upcoming Earth Day. But do forget the overused “Plant a tree for switching to e-statements.” You just missed National Pie Day on January 23rd, which was your chance to hold a pie fundraiser. Sell pies at $10 a piece to throw at your local branch manager to raise funds for Credit Union for Kids or your own charity. But be careful not to encroach on someone’s protected trademark.

Whatever your do, do it well and do it different. Your members will love you for it.

I’d send an invite for each league president to bring themselves and one credit union CEO to a shoot and they’d have a script not to far from this.

Google announced today their new Google Public DNS service.  For those not in the know, recursive DNS, which is what Google is offering, is simplistically a phone book.  It translates “Mr. and Mrs. Johnson” to 800-555-5555.  Applied to the internet, it translates cuemployee.com to 74.208.31.243, which is the IP address of the server running my blog.  As is the Google norm, it is free.Every computer you use to get on the internet has to use a DNS server and normally these are managed by your ISP, but there are other options.

Enter OpenDNS.  They’ve been around for a while now and provide both a free DNS service as well as paid options.  With their free option, you as a consumer get very fast resolution when you type a domain name in and it is smart enough to send you to the correct page when you type in google.co.  When a domain name is mis-typed or does not resolve, you are directed to one of their search pages which contains ads, by Google of course.  Here’s an example.  So OpenDNS pays for their servers, staff, etc by the AdSense revenue they gain from their sponsored search pages.

So what do you do when the company that pays your bills goes into the exactly same business you are in?  Does OpenDNS now race against Google for the fast DNS resolution?  Nobody can compete on price since it is already free.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it.  How are credit unions supposed to differentiate their free checking accounts from one another?  I’m sorry, is it a checking account, share draft account, or a spending account?  Is your checking account free-er than your neighboring credit union?  Wait, you focus on member service, so that’s your differentiation, right?

Think about it.  How much to you pay for a stationary billboard each month?  You get happy employees, a conversation around the vinyl graphic anytime they go somewhere, all for probably at most half of a normal billboard.  Now that is some marketing most credit unions don’t do!

Subway promptly sued Quiznos and iFilm, the Web site owned by Viacom that ran the contest, saying that many of the homemade videos made false claims and depicted its brand in a derogatory way. Subway is also objecting to ads that Quiznos itself created, showing people on the street choosing Quiznos over Subway.

Depending on the way this goes, it could spell bad things for companies using campaigns like this or campaigns that seem a little similar to those launched by others, like Larissa’s credit union video or BankerSpank.

For some reason, the left picture is how I view credit unions and the picture on the right is how I view cool banks like Umpqua, or in this case, Commerce Bank.  Maybe flashy things attract me, but I think I know where I’d rather go to bank.

From the Consumerist and copyranter.  Pictures from Days of Heaven.

Also see the latest post on the fi-linx blog.

Also of interest, the campaign appears to be ran by CavionPlus, now part of Harland.  I wonder if they have a prepackaged "GenY" marketing campaign…