Apple Growth Partners

Healthy growth in financial services marketing comes from a strong brand personality

One example of making a client stand out in an extraordinary way was a certified public accounting firm Moore, Stevens, Apple which was under legal requirement to change its name. Through Innis Maggiore’s proprietary Appreciative Discovery® process, we worked with the client to discover the company’s position and recommend a new name, Apple Growth Partners, to reflect their expertise in growth strategies for privately held businesses.

We created a new logo and tagline, “Apple growth is healthy growth℠;” augmented by regional business publication advertising and radio campaign on the area’s leading news station to generate awareness.

Radio provided the perfect platform to target the right people with an unusual campaign. We say unusual because the client partner was open to making good-natured fun of stereotypes about accountants through our “Invisible Heroes” persona and “brand voice” created by actor René Auberjonois.

The self-deprecating concept was that accountants don’t exactly look the superhero type and are best kept invisible. The campaign ran for three years — and according to the client generated recognition with prospects years after it left the airwaves of Northeast Ohio.

The most gratifying part of this introduction was when the client informed us that the first new client won through our radio-to-web process paid for the whole radio production budget.

GuideStone Financial Resources

Doing well should include doing right for others

Guidestone Financial Resources is a leader in retirement and insurance plans specifically designed and offered to churches and related faith-based agencies. Their brand position is represented by the Innis Maggiore-created tagline, “Do well. Do right.” One of the first accomplishments of our relationship was to dramatize this position of balancing a need for a family’s economic security with a dedication to values-based investing. As a Southern Baptist agency, financial performance and biblical values-based investing are on equal footing, and therein resulted in their position of “performance + values,” also expressed as “performance guided by values.” 

Innis Maggiore produced print, direct mail, event signage, collateral, digital marketing, videos, a quarterly magazine, websites, and much more, dedicated to their multiple divisions (retirement plans, insurance plans, property and casualty insurance, investments, and even their own charity: Mission:Dignity).

Beese Fulmer Private Wealth Management

Financial service marketing the rational way

People with high value investable assets don’t entrust their money to discretionary financial planners easily. Trust is not a transactional commodity. It has to be earned.

Through our Appreciative Discovery®, we learned that Beese Fulmer believes that deliberate, purposeful investment planning, (i.e., time in the market versus timing the market), beats impulsive, haphazard reactions to the latest blip.

We expressed this position as “The Rational Investors” with a new brand identity including a simplified (more digital-friendly) logo, a brightly optimistic color scheme, “Stay Rational” tagline and “The Rules of the Rational™” — five simple common-sense axioms too often ignored by typical investment brokers.

Rational ratcheted success for the firm. Since working with Innis Maggiore, Beese Fulmer has doubled assets under management to become the dominant private wealth management firm in the greater Canton, Stark County market, #11 in Northeast Ohio and #55 on the 2021 CNBC Financial Advisor 100 list, while their website received a Gold Winner award in the 17th Annual Service Industry Advertising Awards.

CSE Federal Credit Union

Positioning a client against an entire category

Usually, positioning differentiates one brand against other brands in the same business. This car’s safer, that delivery’s faster, this pizza tastes better. However, there are instances when it’s more advisable to pit a brand against an entire category.

This is what made the most sense for CSE Federal Credit Union. We used our Appreciative Discovery® facilitated session to determine that CSE shouldn’t waste their time differentiating against other credit unions in their market. They were already the leader in the area, and most consumer choices came down to a decision between a traditional bank or a credit union.

Further, bank consolidation and mergers have given people fewer choices for their banking needs. We worked with the client to create an identity as the banking alternative, using the theme “Bank Local” to distinguish CSE as being in the community and serving the community, as compared to the big, bad out-of-town banks. Our outdoor and print campaign featured real CSE staff pictured in front of recognizable local spots to symbolize this and help make “Bank Local” both a call-to-action and a community cause.

First National Bank

Get a new image with an irreverent approach to attract younger customers

By their own admission, the folks at First National Bank were dormant with customers on the older end of the senior circuit, making their situation less than competitive.

An Appreciative Discovery® session helped us determine that this smaller group of community banks had an advantage over the huge banks in making decisions independently and being less dependent on fees as a revenue stream. We recommended positioning the bank around a “less fees” idea using a graphic inviting people to “SWITCH TO LESS FEES.”

Print ads used irreverent images, such as a guy in a fishbowl scrutinized by a hungry cat (“Ever feel like your bank has you right where it wants you?”), a woman in a mouse trap (“Ever feel like bait to your bank?”), and a guy stuck on a huge slice of pizza (“Ever feel like your bank’s meal ticket?”)

Radio spots updated the nursery rhyme “Fee fi fo fum” as “Fees high … so dumb!” in rock, country, and hip hop styles. Together we witnessed new account openings encouraging the client to continue our irreverent style to pound home the “Switch to Less Fees” message.