Jan. 8, 2009 at 10:38am

Why spend so much effort researching members when we should be researching prospects?

Posted by Kurt Jacobson in Choose the Right Target Audience, New Members, Strategic Communications
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I was reading Filene’s excellent new report, “The Credit Union Brand: What is it Good for?” It got to me wonder why we spend so much time and money researching what customers/members do and think when we should be spending time finding out what our best prospects do and think.

Credit Unions can’t grow much by selling services only to members. Someday we’ll need new members to sell to and will need to replace those who leave. Shouldn’t the prospects get most of the attention?

I would advocate that our best prospects aren’t quite like our current members. Our aging membership proves that our best prospects have to be different.

But it’s so comfortable researching our members. They are familiar to us. We tend to be scared to find out about “those” people who are different. And what we find out about our prospects will force us to change all things we’ve been doing that are so comfortable and familiar to current members, employees and boards.

What do you think?

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