VIDEO INTERVIEW: Brett McDowell of Centennial BANK

We sat down with Brett McDowell of Centennial BANK on how going through a rebrand can change internal culture.

Full transcript below:

It makes me feel great that we make people nervous. I think that’s our job—I think that’s our duty to the shareholders. If we’re making other banks nervous, then we’re doing a lot of things right.

So we’re of a size that, we don’t have a choice but to get out and scrap every day. We—we can’t sit back and rest on the successes that we had yesterday we just can’t afford to do that.

We didn’t approach this—um—as a marketing decision, we approached this as a—cultural decision. This was—this was bigger than marketing. This was about, um, organizational change for us.

So to us having the right brand and the right messaging around that brand is all about building a—a culture. We’re trying to build this superior culture, internally first, and if we can do that internally we’re able to push that out externally to our customers, to the communities that we serve, anybody that’s watching us or paying attention to us from the outside looking in is gonna see that. We’re—we’re achieving that by leaps and bounds because of a great brand.

One of the points at which I really f—figured out that we had done good work here was when we went to some customers to involve them in our marketing, and—and they were—overjoyed to—to participate. They didn’t question anything for a second, they loved the new branding. They—they—it was apparent that they loved the bank, they loved the culture, they could see that in us. And they—and they jumped right in.

So rebranding, or re-presenting yourself as an organization is about how much money you can spend. There are some really big organizations that spend a lot, and get a very poor return on that investment. My advice is to really involve the stakeholders in the process. Involve your people. Bring them into the fold early and let them tell you who you are—who you think you are—and then decide together who you wanna be. And once you figure that out, you can initiate this entire process, and initiate it effectively.

Overdelivery is the—is the competitive advantage that any organization in our space should be driving toward. Um, it’s not easy to do. A lot of people will tell you—a lot of organizations will tell you that they can do it, and do it effectively, but it takes an ambitious mindset. It takes innovation. It takes being different. It takes, uh a lot of different aspects that most organizations are too scared to—to grab hold of.

We set out to change our culture for this effort. And we absolutely nailed that.