[Editor’s Note: This article was excerpted from the book Bold: How to be Brave in Business and Win (Kogan Page, 2011), by Shaun Smith and Andy Milligan. Bold chronicles the brand-building stories of 14 companies, as told by key executives. One such company is Oregon-based Umpqua Bank.]
How many banks promise that your visit to their branch will be “the best thing you did all day”? That’s what Umpqua Bank, the self-styled “greatest bank in the world” passionately believes; it thinks banking should be like a great retail experience and even calls its branches “stores” to highlight that belief.
Umpqua Bank started in 1953 as a small community bank in south Oregon. Ray Davis took over as president in 1994 when the bank had assets of $140 million and employed 60 people. Under Ray’s leadership, the bank grew to more than 180 stores, 2,500 people and over $12 billion in assets. Media outlets like Fast Company and The New York Times have repeatedly recognized Umpqua as one of the “coolest” places to work.
Umpqua (which means “raging waters” in Native American dialect) has positioned itself very successfully as an integral part of the community and as more than just a bank. It encourages its people to work in the community and creates store formats that provide a place where customers can come to spend time, not just bank. It has even taken its store promise out on to the street through its innovative “handshake marketing,” which promises “something wonderful will happen to you today.” Its culture is infectious and new employees and acquired businesses have been described as being “Umpquatized.”
CEO RAY DAVIS DISCUSSES BOLD PRACTICES
â–¶ Your culture is an asset: We have been listed as one of Fortune’ s best companies to work for three years in a row (2008-2010) and yet we’ve integrated 23 different banks in the last nine years into this company. What I tell people is that the single greatest asset we possess is our culture, and yet the area with the greatest amount of risk within our company is our culture, because if we grow for the sake of growth and we forsake the culture, then we’re just going to become another large institution, and bureaucracy will rule, which we refuse to let happen.
To have a strong culture, first you have to drive down decision making to the local level. We think that’s critical. Our company doesn’t have loan committees, for example. We make decisions locally so that we can respond faster to people in our local community.
Number two, you have to be involved in the community. For example, we have a program called “Connect” where we ask all of our associates—and we’ve got about 2,500 of them—to volunteer 40 hours a year of their time to nonprofit organizations that focus on youth and education.
They have to do their 40 hours during business hours and we pay them. In 2010 the company volunteered 31,000 hours in the communities that we serve.
UMPQUA’S LANI HAYWARD DISCUSSES ‘CREATIVE STRATEGY’
The Creative Strategies department at Umpqua is responsible for overseeing the customer experience, the brand and any public channel that our brand is expressed through. So our focus is on making sure that we are continually evolving and remaining relevant for the customer.
We try to make our job titles express exactly what we do. We are creatively and strategically looking at the company’s brand assets. So it is not just implementing a promotion or an advertising campaign; our role is very holistic—it touches every area of this bank. When we think about the customer experience it isn’t just about posters or brochures, or whatever you might have in a normal marketing department; it has to do with people, it has to do with how we operate in the bank, it has to do with sight, sound, taste, anything you can sense—in our stores, online and on the street.
â–¶ The Umpqua brand promise: Our brand promise is to “make your stop at an Umpqua bank the best thing you did all day.” That promise is backed up by this big sign on the wall that says “Welcome to the world’s greatest bank.” So, between the brand promise and knowing we have to be the world’s greatest bank, it’s a huge “ask” of our associates. It drives everyone to create special moments.
There’s one thing we don’t believe in: traditional advertising. About six years ago we started something called “handshake marketing.” The notion was this: We have this very distinct brand, you can feel it when you walk into our stores, literally; you sense what this entity is all about, because you feel it.
But the question is, how do you capture it and communicate it? We can’t do it through an ad, I can’t do it through direct mail; so what does that leave? And handshake marketing came out of that notion.
An example of handshake marketing is demonstrating “random acts of kindness.” So a manager of a store might decide to ask the café down the street to select two lunch tables every day and ask the maître d’ there to give the customers a specially prepared receipt that says, “Your meal is on us—Joe Smith, manager, Umpqua Bank.” You know that person is going to tell at least 10 other people what happened.
â–¶ Get in the flow of social media: We love the emergence of social media because it fits so well with our nontraditional marketing and word-of-mouth approach; it just helps us be exponential about it.
The most important thing to consider about social media sites like Twitter is that the conversation is going on out there about your company regardless of whether you participate in it or not. So we decided to participate.
We remember one occasion when somebody tweeted, “Umpqua stinks because they charged me a fee for something.” It was a very short but very aggressive tweet. Our contact center saw it and tweeted back, saying, “Hey, sounds like you’re having some issues, why don’t you give me a call?” Well, he did, they talked, and five minutes later he went back online to Twitter and wrote: “Umpqua is the best, I love them” to hundreds of his followers.
BOLD LESSON
â–¶ Be the brand: The fact that Ray answers his phone with “Thank you for calling the world’s greatest bank” says something about his vision but also his willingness to “walk the talk.” All too often, executives distance themselves from the promises their organizations make because they feel that providing service is the job of the front-line employees, not the executives.
CONTACT:
Shaun Smith, @ShaunSmith_CEM; Andy Milligan, @Caffeinepartner.