Stop Moving Pixels: Why Credit Union Marketers Need to Become Mad Scientists

If you audited the branding of 80 different credit unions across the country, what would you find? A vast, indistinguishable “sea of sameness.”

In this episode of The Credit Union Connection podcast, host Sarah Snell Cooke sat down with Terry Seitz, partner and COO of The Nuance Collective, to discuss a sobering reality: despite 75% of Americans holding a positive view of credit unions, only 25% actually bank with them. The culprit? Lackluster, undifferentiated marketing that plays it safe by focusing entirely on commoditized features.

“Everybody is talking about community, membership, a parody of rates, and financial wellbeing,” Seitz warns. “We are basically bankrupting our brands by trying to avoid risk.”

Seitz argues that the days of the marketer acting purely as a “commercial artist” chasing pithy taglines are over. To survive, the modern marketing function must transition into a mad scientist—a data-driven role focused systematically on driving true enterprise value, profit margin, and pricing power.

Key Takeaways from the Discussion:

• The $200 Billion Penalty: The staggering annual cost of unoriginal, dull creative on organizations trying to achieve competitive results.
• The 17-Year Sticky Factor: Why credit unions are DOA if they fail to break into a consumer’s predetermined consideration set before major life milestones happen.
• Conductors vs. Musicians: Why the future of AI in marketing belongs to design-and-systems thinkers who understand corporate finance, rather than creators of individual text or image widgets.

“The opportunity to break free from the sea of sameness far outweighs the risk of staying in it,” says Seitz.

Sarah Snell Cooke: Hello and welcome. I am Sarah Snell Cooke, as always, your host here at the Credit Union Connection. I was joined recently by Terry Seitz, who is a co-founder as well as COO and CMO at a group called The Nuance Collective, working on brands and marketing for credit unions. We discuss the importance of brand and how to make that happen to differentiate yourself because that is truly the only way credit unions are going to be able to grab the attention of the younger generation, or anybody for that matter, as well as marketing and all kinds of stuff to deal with your external communications to your members. So with that in mind, why don’t we go ahead and connect with Terry?

Sarah Snell Cooke: Hello and welcome everyone. I am Sarah Snell Cooke, your host here at the Credit Union Connection. I am joined today by Terry Seitz. Welcome.

Terry Seitz: Thank you so much for having me.

Sarah Snell Cooke: Absolutely. And he is the partner and COO at a company called The Nuance Collective. Tell us a little bit more about yourself and the collective.

Terry Seitz: Excellent. Again, thank you for having me. Terry Seitz, partner and chief operating officer at The Nuance Collective. We are a brand consultancy/advertising agency, depending on how you want to define us, but that is basically what we do. We are part provocation. We are a unique band of merry provocateurs who are very much about helping brands create and drive enterprise value.

That sounds like a lot of marketing jargon, so let me translate, distill, and crystallize that down. As you and I were talking off-screen about what I would tell my 20-year-old self, one of the interesting things about my career, which has spanned 20 to 25 years in the marketing business, is a re-anchoring on what our remit is and what we do for a living.

When I first started in the advertising business in New York a couple of decades ago, we fashioned ourselves as commercial artists. The agency world was populated with copywriters, designers, photographers, actors, producers, and social commentators—all of these brilliant folks who were much more on the creative side of life. They made advertising, and that was their way to make a living while indulging in their passions and subject matter expertise. Those were the days when you didn’t really have to measure anything or be held accountable for anything. It was the John Wanamaker era: “50% of my ad budget is wasted; I just don’t know which 50%.” That existed well into my early career.

But in the last two decades, it has changed with the advent of attribution, marketing mix models, and digital marketing. Tectonic plates underneath us forced us to change, and now we are in an era where we measure everything because we can. So the remit or the role of a marketer or an advertiser—be it at a credit union, an agency, or a consultancy—has changed from being a commercial artist to a mad scientist, which is a fascinating career arc and retrospective for me and the discipline as a whole.

What I mean by a mad scientist is that there is a formal, systemic approach to how we go about our jobs. We come up with hypotheses, test them, confirm and analyze them, course-correct, optimize, and then communicate them out. It is a much more rigorous discipline than what existed 20 or 25 years ago. Now, that doesn’t mean we have starched out the creativity in what we all do because I think there is some alchemy in what a scientist works with in their lab. The alchemy, which goes back to this notion of being “mad,” is what we are all trying to do: search for some sort of truth. Science is about the search for truth—the hypothesis, and the debunking or confirmation of it. That is a wonderful thing.

The challenge that we all have, to get a little philosophical, is that you, I, and the billions of people around the world are by nature illogical, non-binary, and irrational in how we make decisions, particularly purchase decisions. Which brings me back to the beginning part of my diatribe: our remit in marketing is not about being commercial artists, but driving enterprise value for our organizations. For credit unions and for all of us, it is driving growth, driving profit, the margin associated with profit, pricing power, and risk optimization. That is our job. Our job is not moving pixels and coming up with pithy taglines and newsletter content. Yes, those are all inputs.

Sarah Snell Cooke: That’s the best part, man.

Terry Seitz: It is the best part, but we often forget—and I have forgotten at various points in my 20-year career—that we are in the business of driving enterprise value. For me, it is a huge unlock. If we are not doing those things consciously and systematically planning against them, then we are not doing our jobs. So one of the things I would tell my 20-year-old self is to realize why you are in the business: to drive profit, margin, growth, pricing power, and optimizing against risk and future cash flows. That is why we are in the business.

So, I am off my soapbox, but that is who I am.

Sarah Snell Cooke: I think we’re done. That’s it, we’re done. No, see ya. We’re done, but you forget. It is amazing how often people forget why we are doing this because we are living in the frying pan, we have our to-do lists, and every once in a while it’s important to take three steps back—as my team teases me about my phrases—and go, “Okay, let’s realize again why we’re doing this and how we’re helping our clients.” That is what my agency does. We are all about provocation in service of driving enterprise value, and that is about not resting on the status quo, which goes back to this notion of the search for truth in a mad scientist.

One of the things that you and I were talking about offline is this notion of the truth in the credit union industry right now. I believe, and I hope you agree—if not, we can debate it—that there is this idea of a sea of sameness with brands and what credit unions stand for. That is something to consider and be very wary of. We have this notion at the agency that there is an aversion to risk that exists for many brands, and what that is leading to is an inversion to risk. We are basically bankrupting our brands by not standing for something because we all stand for the exact same things in the credit union industry.

We have a bunch of proprietary AI tools that try to understand how a brand and its resonance exist out in the ether—both what you as a credit union are communicating, and then what is being communicated back to you and summarized. What we have found by doing 60 to 80 audits across credit unions across the country—from Kentucky to North Dakota, California, Texas, and everywhere in between, of different sizes and different industry verticals—is the following: Everybody is talking about community. Everybody is talking about membership. Everybody is talking about a parity of products, services, and rates. Everybody talks about some amorphous idea of financial wellbeing. A lot of us are talking about us, and not the members. So, we are not standing out.

To take this further, you quoted in your piece a couple of days ago that only 35% of Americans know what a credit union does. That is because when we communicate, it is being forgotten and ignored. Either we are all saying the same things, or we are not differentiated enough against the competitive set in a local community who are saying things louder, with more weight and media dollars behind them.

My last point on this is that this is not just marketing theory or academics for the sake of it. There is a real bottom-line business drag and lag on many of us living in this sea of sameness. There is a study done by Karen Nelson-Field, who works for a research company called Amplified Intelligence, connected to another entity called Eat Big Fish and Adam Morgan. They came out with a seminal, sobering indictment of the cost of a sea of sameness. They call it dull creative and media marketing, but assume it is a proxy for a sea of sameness. It costs $200 billion for companies that have undifferentiated, lackluster, dull creative and media every year. Or rather, it would cost them $200 billion in incremental dollars to achieve the same results from an enterprise value creation perspective as it does brands and campaigns that are not dull, that are differentiated, and that live in people’s minds. That is a staggering amount of money, and it goes back to this notion that an aversion to risk is an inversion to risk. We are wasting much of our media, marketing, creative resources, FTEs, and investments because we have decided to be safe rather than to be different.

Sarah Snell Cooke: Can I just… Are you ready for me?

Terry Seitz: I’m ready, Sarah.

Sarah Snell Cooke: I’m ready. I’m so sorry. Yes, of course I’m ready. Totally, and that’s part of what I talked about a week or two ago on branding about differentiation. Really, your rates anybody can match, your products pretty much anybody can match. Your differentiation is your brand. How many blue logos or “First Communities” or whatever type of credit union name out there are exactly the same? That is just talking about brand identity. That’s not even going into what brand really is, meaning your search for truth, like you said scientists do, and we’re the mad scientists now. So talk a little bit more about a brand’s truth.

Terry Seitz: I think a brand’s truth goes back to the fundamentals of marketing: members, prospects, and consumers have a very real set of needs. They are functional needs like auto, mortgage, checking, and savings. Those are things that enable them to progress and live their life—very functional things. But there are also emotional needs. What those functional things do ultimately impacts and influences the emotional needs of those members. The truth is marrying or triangulating those two things with a unique set of benefits that a credit union can actually provide to them. So it isn’t just advertising or marketing that says, “We have X rate or X product.” You need to go to the “why” and “what does that matter.” That means walking in the shoes of your prospective members or your members to understand the bigger emotional picture of how it fits into their lives.

There is a famous TED Talk speaker named Simon Sinek. His whole theory is this notion that people don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it, and that goes to the emotional need state. He bases his theory on the fact that people make purchase decisions first and foremost through the limbic part of one’s brain—the emotional side—and only rationalize those purchase decisions in the neocortex afterward. It is this notion that emotions, not logic, drive decisions. Therefore, don’t just lead with products, services, and rates, but why you are putting them out there and what the larger emotional benefit is that they provide your members. That is such a critical pivot to think about.

But again, going back to the sea of sameness, we seem to operate in the safe space of just communicating these five products and services, and then wonder why there is not as much uptick. The scary thing, but also the opportunistic thing, is that the credit union space and the financial services space writ large is not a fast-moving space in terms of people adopting and changing their perceptions and behaviors on the products and services we provide. If you think about data from Bankrate and The Zebra, it takes 17 years for people to switch their primary checking and savings account. It takes three years for people to switch their primary credit card, and almost a third never do. The average auto loan term is about five to six years. Mortgages, people take two to three out in their lifetime, and average home ownership is about eight years.

I say all of this to say that if we exist in the sea of sameness and don’t differentiate, given the slow stagnation of behavior and perception moves, we are DOA. We will never win at that game of resonance and differentiation, and that has a chilling effect on lifetime value and future cash flows for a credit union. If you believe Simon Sinek that emotions, not logic, drive purchase decisions, then it stands to reason you need to be different to stoke someone’s emotion so that you can get into their consideration set.

Sarah Snell Cooke: Yes, thank you. Credit unions feel that the business they do is so serious, and they want to exude confidence out of every pore of their being. But confidence and the seriousness of their business doesn’t mean you blend into the background because you’re just like everybody else trying to put those points out there. As you said, members buy a car because they are driving home, see a flashy red car in a lot, and they’re like, “I’m just gonna go buy it.” That happens. But the marketing almost never reflects the feelings because of the seriousness and having to be stable for the member when the member is not stable. None of us are. They are making decisions a lot of times emotionally, but credit unions very often don’t take advantage of that because they are either scared to because nobody else is doing it—that’s a big thing for credit unions—or they lose their train of thought.

Terry Seitz: You raise a really interesting opportunity. I just spent the last 12 minutes indicting the industry, and I certainly don’t mean to do that. Again, it’s this search for truth and provocating toward where I think the opportunity space is. The fact that credit unions, by and large, are so embedded into the fabric of a community or an industry vertical is untapped. If we think about regional, super-regional, and national banks—and I say this as a guy who used to work at Visa for almost 13 years—they are faceless organizations who really don’t care about the individual in Laredo, Bismarck, or St. Louis. You are just an account or a Social Security number to them. That is not the ethos and the DNA of most credit unions, and for me, that is a massive opportunity.

Now, you have to go beyond just talking about being a member of the community and being a neighbor. It’s about what those things actually mean to the individual. That is where getting personal and walking in their shoes is such an unlock. There was another study done by Co-operate that says 75% of Americans have a positive view of credit unions, but only 25% actually bank with them. You bridge that gap by creating resonance between the credit union and members or prospective members over the lifetime of your relationship with them. It is just a massively untapped insight to be able to say, “I get you.” That is not necessarily taking a risk. We’re not about to be Liquid Death, if you think about their strange, wonderful marketing; you don’t have to go to that length, but you better create some resonance or you’re not gonna get into someone’s consideration set.

If you think about the brands in your mind and in your heart that you consider from a credit union or a financial services space when you are looking for those products and services, it is a very small set. There’s a fallacy that there are a dozen. No, there’s three or four, or two or three. Many in that consideration set are predetermined. The idea that you can somehow lodge your way into the consideration set if you’re not already there is incredibly hard, near impossible. Research from 6sense states that 80% of the brands in a consideration set are predetermined.

How do you get there? To your very good point about brand, it’s about creating strong and sustainable heuristics. A heuristic is simply a shorthand memory association with your brand. If you have a strong one, you are more likely to be in that consideration set to ultimately be chosen. But if people don’t know who you are, why you exist, or the true benefits of what you provide them, you’ll just never be considered. It’s really hard to be considered when you are either ignored, not known, or the attributions and memories of your brand are the exact same as the other folks down the block, or Chase, Citi, Wells, and Capital One. If you’re not differentiated, you have a very small shot at being part of that consideration set because people don’t remember you for anything.

Sarah Snell Cooke: Yeah, because the biggest brands, the most highly valued brands—the Apples, the Amazons, the Googles—they’re fun, they’re aspirational. Money can be that way. Who doesn’t aspire to something that costs money? So yeah, I think you’re dead on about all of that. You were talking a bit about what is missing in a lot of credit unions’ branding and marketing. Why do you want to work with credit unions?

Terry Seitz: Oh my gosh, it is a massive passion of mine because you see the opportunity space and the white space. I’m a big fan of positioning and branding maps. You chart them out on opposed axes and you go, “They’re all talking about this. They’re all talking about membership, parity products, services, rates, and community in amorphous ways. We’re all talking about us, not them.” As a marketer and a mad scientist, there’s so much wonderful opportunity to help credit unions stand on their own and ultimately drive enterprise value creation. That to me is a wonderful calling as a practitioner.

I also think to myself—I’m gonna go old man for a second—when you and I are on our rocking chairs in X number of years having retired, and you look back on your career, you want to look back and say, “Those were five or six brands, opportunities, or challenges that I helped build, fix, or sustain.” The credit union space is this incredible opportunity to not just play David versus Goliath, but really unlock a lot more of the enterprise value creation that isn’t happening because we’ve all taken this safe sea of sameness road. It’s a higher calling, but it’s a rocking chair thing as well.

Sarah Snell Cooke: Yes, I kind of saved this question for second to last because I am so sick of talking about AI and all its different aspects. But in particular, what is the role of AI in marketing, and what is your thought on people saying it’s gonna be the death of the profession? We have two minutes, dude.

Terry Seitz: Oh my gosh, this is a whole other conversation. I live in San Francisco, so I often have to pump the brakes on what’s hyperbole and hysteria versus not, because AI is so fundamental to the economy and the people that I live next to, down the block, and at the kids’ baseball games. I’m a believer in that it can, should, and is already automating a lot of the processes and the fluff out of marketing. Media planning and operations are among those things. All net good. I would argue also the advent of synthetic research is going to be a very good thing for us in the discipline.

Conversely, there is a lot of slop and a regression to the mean in terms of content. We are creating content at warp speed, and we’ll continue to do that as AI moves from written prompts to audio prompts. Your voice is much faster and can express it quicker, so the amount of content will just continue to proliferate at a speed that we probably don’t want. Now, is that gonna take entry-level positions away? Sure. Is that gonna take operational positions away? Yes, sure.

What I think it changes, though, is that we are less about the inputs, the widgets, and the Henry Ford assembly line. Take it to an orchestra: we are less about the oboe, the drums, the clarinet, the flute, and the violin individuals working in a silo. The marketing functions within credit unions and brands that are going to succeed are the ones that are going to become conductors. They are going to think and act in design and systems, not in widgets and specific advertising assets or one single discipline like media, strategy, or creative content. You’re going to have to think critically to succeed. That’s the reality of where we’re at.

Going back for a second, as prospects and members think about the consideration set, AI is the default moving forward. It is replacing search. There’s a whole other discussion about the layers involved in that, hallucination, and whether the models are playing back the things we want. It’s a reality that we have to come to grips with, but I would push the brakes a little bit on the hysteria and the hyperbole around AI right now. It is a movable force.

Going back to your initial question of what would I tell my 20-year-old self—and I mentor a lot of kids coming out of college who want to make a 30-year career in marketing or advertising—it’s a different world than when I grew up. I would say two things: You better be a conductor and a master in design and systems thinking with respect to AI, and two, you better become a subject matter expert in corporate finance. The divide between the marketing function, the C-suite, and the CFO exists because we historically have done a very poor job defining the impact that we have on enterprise value. If you want to be the CMO or the VP of a credit union, and you want that facet of the organization to be treated seriously, you have to know the fundamentals of corporate finance.

Sarah Snell Cooke: Yeah, absolutely. Because in addition to that, marketing is also taking over what used to be a large chunk of the sales role, too. Anyway, not gonna get into the whole marketing/sales debacle, but we do have a couple of seconds left. I always allow my guests to have the final thoughts. What would you like to leave our credit union executive audience with today?

Terry Seitz: Seize the day—carpe diem. I think trust in larger-scale financial institutions is at a low, and I think that will continue to be the case. The opportunity is to really think about why you exist and what benefit that provides your members. Walk in their shoes, map your products and services to their life stages, and have an intuitive understanding. You are them; you are going through those same life stages, presumably. Try to break free from the sea of sameness because the opportunity to do so far outweighs the risk of not doing so.

Sarah Snell Cooke: 100%. Thanks so much for your time, Terry. Appreciate it.

Terry Seitz: Thank you, Sarah.