The World’s Greatest Marketer to Kids

Start ‘em young and you got ‘em for life!

August 2006 By Denny Hatch

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U.S. Bancorp, KeyBank, J.P. Morgan Chase, USAA, Wells Fargo--and many others--are launching marketing campaigns aimed at children.

The idea is to get kids used to putting money away at a very young age. Some banks make it possible to deposit as little as 10 cents. Others are giving away premiums and prizes ranging from stick-on tattoos to music downloads when they have $100 in their accounts.

My exhaustive (and exhausting!) file of news stories contains many accounts of gimlet-eyed, self-styled anti-marketing-to-kids police worried about everything from violent computer games to Oreo cookies.

Of one thing I am absolutely sure: No one before or since has marketed to kids with elegance and success of Frank O. Brock, long-time president of the First Bank of Troy, Idaho.

The Amazing Bob Hemmings
Bob Hemmings is one of the great men of direct marketing. Now close to age 90 and proprietor of the Hemmings IV Direct agency in Pasadena, Calif., Hemmings is dapper, intense, powerfully built, and immediately recognizable with his Adolph Menjou mustache and bone crusher of a handshake.

Look for Hemmings and chances are you'll find him on an airplane, either en route to taking care of a client or just returning from giving a seminar on direct marketing.

In his younger days, a friend of Hemmings was Frank O. Brock, president of the First Bank of Troy, Idaho.

Troy's population in 1960 was 514; Brock's bank had 6,000 active accounts--12 times as many people who lived in the town. He had customers in 45 states and around the world as far away as Pago Pago.

What was Brock's secret?

Know What Business You Are In
Hemmings recalled that Brock knew precisely what business he was in.

I am in the financial services business to help provide finances for my customers from the cradle to the grave.

Brock once made a loan to a man who had robbed the bank five years before. He was caught and served three years in prison. "He had learned his lesson," Brock said. "I don't hold past mistakes against him. He is a much more stable individual now."

Know Your Customers--Intimately
According to Hemmings, Brock paid personal attention to all his customers. He cared. He understood his customers and knew practically all of the them by their first names; whenever a good loan customer ran into financial difficulty, the bank carried him--without dunning notices or piling up interest charges--until he was back on his feet.

Brock's entire day was spent in his office going over his list of customers and clipping newspapers. Whenever someone would marry, die, move away, give birth, etc., he would send a remembrance. All of his customers received a personal note or a telephone call at least once a month from Brock.

The current buzz phrase for what Brock did is "Continuous Event Marketing."

Acquisition Wizardry
Brock's other main function was greeting new depositors.

When the child of a customer reached a certain age--let's say 6 years old--the kid would receive an invitation to come to the bank with his parents. There he would be greeted at the door by none other than Brock and given a formal tour of the facilities (the vault was a favorite), then brought back for a welcoming chat in the president's office.

At the end of the conversation, Brock would take out a brand new crisp $1 bill and present it to the child and then lead the little tyke up to the teller's window where a passbook savings account would be opened in the kid's name. With great ceremony, the child would give the teller his new $1 bill and the teller would present Brock with the passbook who, in turn, would present it to the child with a flourish.

Later, in high school, the kid would open a checking account. Later still, this young man (or woman) would go away to college ... go into the Army ... get discharged and get a job in a distant town or another country ... but always keep the accounts at that original bank. He knew the president. If he ever needed to borrow money, he could do so on his name alone. If he ever needed cash, it immediately would be wired to him, no questions asked. If he ever moved back to town and wanted a mortgage, it was a piece of cake. Wherever that kid was in the world, Brock was HIS personal banker.

Hence 6,000 active accounts in a town of 514.

This is textbook database marketing--and with no regression analysis, no sophisticated modeling, no CHAID, thank you very much. Rather, it's the story of a brilliant personal banker, a marketer whose business was the continual delight of his customers for better or worse, in sickness and in health, for richer for poorer, till death did they part.

Years later, Hemmings phoned the bank. Brock had long since died, but Hemmings reached on the phone the chief cashier he had worked alongside so many years before. The bank had been bought out by a larger bank.

"Is the new president still going over the customer lists the way Frank used to?" Hemmings wanted to know.

"Aw, hell, we're so busy with paperwork and dealing with the computer, nobody has time for customers any more," he said and then added, "but, you know, maybe we should."

Today, bankers--and many marketers--have become so dependent upon the computer that they've lost touch with the fact that a database isn't about blips on a reel of tape but rather, warm, living, breathing people.

The computer could do some of what Brock did; for example, with continual updates and overlays, it might keep track of which bank customers had moved to new homes and send a congratulatory note--but long after the fact. And, no doubt, that would be after it had smugly turned down the mortgage application, enabling another bank to write the business.

What's more, computers can't read the newspaper and make a note of births, engagements, weddings and deaths and act on them. To my knowledge, nowhere in the modern world is to be found a savvy, yet caring and forgiving computer-literate banker who has the knowledge, wit and decency to not only make money from customers but, at the same time on a highly personal level, make the bank's family of customers feel good about themselves and feel good about where they are stashing their hard-earned cash.

In the words of Peter Drucker:

The computer is a moron.

So are modern day bankers.