When it comes to market strategy, banking is like any other industry. The fundamentals of successful market positioning hold true:

• Your brand is whatever the market perceives it to be
• You cannot claim a position that is already occupied
• Service isn’t your differentiator – it’s your ante into the game
• It’s more profitable to be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond

The question is how to apply these fundamentals profitably within the banking market, which is both extremely crowded and rapidly evolving. In addition, the banking industry today is challenged by the emergence of commodity banking, the risk of specialization and the cost of innovation.

So what’s a banker to do? Identify the strategy that provides your organization its greatest likelihood of success, based on factors such as:

• Community demographics and economics
• Competitive landscape
• Technology infrastructure
• Availability of skilled personnel

Take, for example, Ridgewood Savings Bank in New York. Ridgewood’s demographic research indicated many of its customers were now living in retirement villages making travel to the bank’s branches more difficult. Ridgewood addressed this changing demographic by introducing their Mobile Banking Center, a specially designed vehicle equipped with teller windows, ATM, private office, customer service desk, and wheelchair access. Ridgewood personnel drive the branch-on-wheels to various retirement communities on a regularly scheduled basis. Obviously, this strategy required a major investment on the bank’s part. But the initiative not only preserved an important segment of Ridgewood’s customer base, it earned the bank positive press and accolades from the New York Banking Commission, and reinforced its position as a community-focused bank.

The key for this bank, like other successful organizations, was to develop a unique market strategy and ensure that its investment in marketing and technology directly supported the strategy.

A good market strategy is a prerequisite to success. It enables you to:

• Differentiate yourself from the competition
• Increase customer value
• Capitalize on specialty, underserved and emerging markets
• Assess and manage risk profitability