Marketers: It's Time to Lean In

Marketers. This is our moment for real change and that change has to come from us individually.

Inspired by the call to truly "lean into" this moment from our Bank President Curt Queyrouze and the incredibly insightful article written by Lizette Williams, the marketing team here at TAB Bank is leaning in.

To be frank and honest, I'm not sure what this is going to look like and how exactly this is going to work. We are almost guaranteed to make a million mistakes along the way but the ambiguity and uncertainty of the moment for those of us of privilege, also provides an opportunity to for us to really enact long lasting change that allows us to start overcoming our unintentional and unconscious bias in our marketing efforts.

We are starting off with a premise that this is simply the right thing to do. Not only from a position that this is the moral high ground but also one that this will be table stakes moving forward for all marketing departments.

As Lizette mentioned in her article "This is our moment to drive true change for a consumer base that has served as the muse for aspirational culture for decades."

We will be doubling down on creating an inclusive audience segment by committing a significant portion of our marketing budget in developing quantitative and qualitative insights into them. With those insights we will find ways to overcome our institutional, algorithmic and personal biases to truly live up to our mission to provide access to financial services to the underserved.

Our partners (agencies, vendors etc.) will also be vetted towards this inclusive culture. This will not be "nice to have" but will be a mandatory requirement moving forward. In short, this will be part of our systems, our processes and will be part of TAB Bank's marketing DNA from here on out.

With these diverse insights, we will move forward with creatives and messaging to match and ones that reflect their cultural and societal norms with a marketing budget that is robust enough to fully test, optimize and effectively reach those communities.

As I have said in many times in the past, no one can help everyone but everyone can help someone. However, in order to be "all in together" we need to be in the same room. Today is not when marketers will be judged. We will be judged 6 months, 2 years, 50 years from now when the fruits of the seeds we sow today will have blossomed and the results of our marketing practices, structures and systems will be radiating for all to see.

We can do this, we just need to lean into it.