Reinforcing your brand: First Franklin Financial Corporation, San Jose, California, builds its brand awareness among brokers as a leading nonprime lender with several different approaches that all reinforce its message.

CREATING A BRAND ISN'T JUST FOR RETAILERS ANYMORE. Wholesale nonprime lending is a business that could benefit from following a few of the tricks of the retail trade, especially when signs indicate the mortgage industry is looking less robust. [??] The threat of rising interest rates has started

to discourage many potential buyers from investing in homeownership, slowing mortgage sales in both the prime and nonprime niches. There are fewer home loan applications coming to our mortgage broker customers, meaning less business for lenders. And when it comes to niche markets, such as nonprime home loans, business prospects are even smaller. Nonprime lenders will have to work smarter for market share. [??] So, how does a company like ours make sure that brokers send every nonprime deal our way? By applying retailers' integrated branding strategies to our wholesale brand. [??] The concept of integrated marketing is nothing new. By maintaining a consistent look, feel and message across your marketing vehicles, you'll achieve better recognition of your brand message among your customers. But creating that message (and image) is much more complicated within the wholesale nonprime mortgage environment. Your products and services ultimately benefit borrowers with unique financial needs, but the brand promise must also appeal to your broker customers' desire to find the right lender for their nonprime borrowers quickly and easily. [??] Discovering your brand promise will get you halfway there. A successful branding campaign is one that integrates your marketing message and your people. Without buy-in from your own employees--particularly salespeople, customer service people and those who have direct contact with your customers--your brand identity won't have much value and your marketing efforts will fall flat. To be successful, you need to integrate the right message, media and manpower into your branding campaign.

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Start by defining your business

What is the nonprime niche? There's no established Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac definition of a nonprime loan, so even seasoned mortgage brokers may not understand what types of borrowers would fit into a nonprime program.

Who is a good candidate for a nonprime loan? It could be someone with a good credit history, with a FICO[R] credit score around 700, who would prefer a zero-down-payment home loan in order to protect existing investments. It could be a self-employed borrower with no W-2 and hard-to-verify income. Or it could be a cash-strapped buyer with a past bankruptcy and a 540 FICO score.

The nonprime niche isn't just a FICO range; it's a range of services offered to a variety of borrowers. But your brokers may not think of your company's products as a good fit when these borrowers come to them for mortgage advice.

You can't be everything to everyone, so your brand's benefit to your customers must be explicitly clear. The primary goal of your branding campaign should be to create connections between what your company stands for and your brokers' customers. If your company's brand is at the top of brokers' minds when a nonprime loan comes through the door, you'll be the first lender they'll contact to help them get the deal done.

Unless you're a new nonprime lending company, you may already have a brand identity that resonates in your brokers' minds. But is it the right brand? My company, First Franklin Financial Corporation, San Jose, California (www.ff.com), recently went through this exercise to discover that many of our brokers had no idea who we were or what we stood for.

Some thought we were just an 80/20 combo shop. Others only thought of us when they were funding cash out refinances. Even though we had been around since the early 1980s, our brand identity was all over the map.

Much of it was our own fault. Having gone through several logo and tagline changes over the past five years, we knew that we needed to establish a strong brand identity or we'd lose market share--particularly in the potentially tougher times ahead in the industry. We had to clearly define who we were and what we could do for our customers.

Distinguish your brand

If you don't have a brand, you're just another commodity mortgage lender. Branding is more than just a logo, a tagline or an ad. It's the collective perception of a company based on customer experience. It's a promise we make to our broker customers.

Over time, a customer's experience with your company creates a set of expectations about a brand. A good brand makes a compelling connection between what you offer and what's valuable to your customers. When a company makes this connection, it enjoys more customer loyalty, larger market share and greater return on investment (translation: more sales during the industry's leaner periods).

What does your company promise to do for your customers? What do your customers need? What can they expect if they work with your account executives and inside staff? A good brand answers all of these questions immediately in the minds of your customers. Your company's brand is not just about the types of products you offer--it's about giving your customers a rewarding experience.

What sets your company apart? What makes your customers choose you? Your products and service may be the obvious answer to these questions, but the real answers lie elsewhere: among your account executives and your customers.

As I mentioned earlier, many of our brokers had misconceptions about First Franklin's business, due to our fragmented branding efforts in the past. If we hadn't talked with our brokers and account executives, we couldn't have created an effective strategy for debunking false impressions of our company's brand promise.

You can't create a brand in a vacuum. Without buy-in from your employees, any branding campaign is doomed to fail. Your employees are your brand ambassadors. If they are part of the new brand's creation, they will rally behind your new message and will incorporate it into their own value messages as they sell your products to your brokers.

Enlist your employees to join a steering committee. Invite a cross-section of employees--not just creative staff and senior executives, but especially those employees "in the trenches" who deal directly with your customers. Make sure that you're including representatives from your sales and customer service staffs.

It's no coincidence that your top salespeople and service people are successful. If you are in wholesale, they are the ones that have developed strong relationships with your broker customers that help them sell more. The feedback they can give you about their day-to-day interactive experience with your customers is vital. They know the objections, the product features and the service needs that your customers value--and that you need to incorporate into your brand.

A successful brand must be defendable, identifiable and relevant. Be sure, however, that your brand promise is accurate. For example, if you say that your company can underwrite a loan in 24 hours, make sure your underwriters can do it in 24 hours or less.

If you promise big, deliver even more. The worst thing you can do to damage your brand, reputation and bottom line is to make a customer pledge that you can't keep. A winning campaign doesn't just tell customers what the company does; it backs it up by showing them.

Mobilize your message

Consistency is key when it comes to brand execution in marketing. The message, approach and design you choose in your direct-mail or e-mail campaign should also be incorporated into your print ads and on your Web site.

Communicating a uniform message across the multiple touch points that you have with customers will increase your chance of getting through to them. At First Franklin, we've taken a retail approach with our creative design that includes bright, eye-catching imagery; vivid language; and direct-value connections to the products, services and value that brokers can expect from our company. If your company's look is consistent, your customers will immediately know the piece is from you. If you're promoting something they value, your customers will pay attention to your message.

From application to close, First Franklin's brand promise to provide simple, flexible, hassle-free home loans is consistently integrated into every stage of the process. That's who we are and what we do, and that's what our brokers can expect in this and every future nonprime loan they fund with us. It's reinforced every step of the way on every single deal. Because we have created a meaningful definition of our nonprime niche, our brokers now know to look within our guidelines for loans that fit their first-time, low-cash, self-employed and credit-challenged borrowers' needs.

This brand is bolstered through every point of contact with the company. The Web site, marketing collateral, loan processing, broker application process and customer service experience must all work in tandem.

Take a targeted approach

The mistake many companies make with their branding campaigns is they concentrate their efforts and budgets on general messaging. Print advertising is a great way to impart your universal brand proposition to your audience, but it isn't effective as a stand-alone promotion. Each marketing vehicle, from the trade show booth to your on-hold messaging at your office, has its own advantage. If used effectively, each piece contributes to the overall brand promise.

Targeted marketing is often a marriage of art and science. In this case, it's a combination of your brand identity, your customer relationships and your technological sophistication. Adopting a customer relationship management (CRM) system is a great way to easily access everything you need to know about your customers for effective customer profiling and list management.

If your account executives are using their CRM tool correctly, you should be able to slice and dice your customer preferences to your specifications. Whether you're looking to find customers who come to you for a specific kind of product, looking for overall trends within a single market or looking for prospects for a new type of home loan product, everything is available at your fingertips.

Maintaining the integrity of your customer list is vital to the usefulness of a CRM. Generally, list management is the responsibility of your salespeople, who are in contact with your brokers on a regular basis. With 35 wholesale sales branches across the country, First Franklin's corporate marketing team also relies on branch and regional marketing coordinators to assist with managing customer information within the CRM and using it to help with localizing marketing materials. In addition, they are constantly grooming the list to ensure that all opt-in and opt-out requests are honored and integrated into the system.

The best way to target the audience and the message you want to send is by knowing what your customer wants. Take e-mail, for example. No one wants to be considered a spammer. How much e-mail do you send? What types of messages do you send? The key to avoiding the spam stigma is to ensure that you're sending quality content. Remember: It's not spam if it's something they want to read.

First Franklin works with a third-party e-mail vendor, through which we publish and track our e-mail marketing campaigns. As part of our recent integrated branding campaign, our corporate marketing team created benefit-driven messages and graphics to add to our e-mail library. After running a customer profile and pulling a clean list from our CRM for each e-mail distribution, our regional marketing coordinators and account executives would set up the distribution list to correspond with customers who would be interested in a particular brand-related message. The template designed by our creative services team contains locked information corresponding with the primary value-focused content, as well as customizable space for each group to localize for its market.

Evaluating your brand

By integrating the local spin on our brand messages, leveraging personal relationships, using our CRM and e-mail marketing tools and offering benefit-driven content, First Franklin's e-mail marketing success has been impressive. Our delivery rate is at 93 percent, and our click-through rate is at 43 percent. And that's just a piece of our integrated brand marketing campaign.

But how do you really assess your brand campaign? An integrated brand marketing effort requires more than a consistent look and feel from your corporate office--it requires an integration of your brand, message, media and employees. There are a lot of moving parts involved.

You can track click-through rates and response rates on direct-mail and e-mail campaigns or calculate the rate of return on investment, but at the end of the day what really measures your brand effectiveness is how you're perceived by your brokers. If they know who you are, what you do, what you can do for them and why you're the best lender in your niche, you're on the right track.

A branding campaign is never over. Every point of contact between you and your broker customers is a reinforcement of your brand identity. Remember: You're constantly building the brand as you're making the sale and you're creating new brand experiences that will result in ongoing sales, a better brand and a bigger bottom line.

Stephen Corsi is senior vice president of marketing for First Franklin Financial Corporation, San Jose, California, responsible for all facets of marketing strategy and implementation for the company. He can be reached at stephen.corsi@ff.com.