Glatt Consulting, LLC Gen-Y marketing expert and consultant Justin Ho is slated to speak at the CUNA Yes Summit in December. His expertise on recruiting young board members (he is a Board member at USC Credit Union in Los Angeles, California) is the reason for his inclusion, but I have a feeling attendees will walk away with much more than what his topic suggests. Attendees would be wise to solicit Justin's opinions on Gen-Y-specific product and service information while he is at the conference.
Justin joined GCLLC just a few weeks ago and already he has attracted much attention for his thoughts and ideas on how credit unions can expand their relevancy to the "youth market."
He did an interview with one of the trade publications soon after he started with the firm and one of the questions had to do with the true importance of young members. Apparently some in the industry think that the youth market is no big deal. Their belief is that we will get them at some point. We have a classification for those who hold such opinions: merger candidates.
Just kidding - sort of. One of the major problems with believing that the youth will somehow find their way to the credit union promised land is that they really have no one to lead them there. Other industry charters and structures have a much louder voice, and are working hard using whatever avenues they have available to woo this market.
With thanks to Justin for my crash course in Gen-Y motivations, a driver of Gen-Y decision-making seems to be the leanings of peer networks. A great source of the general ranking of peer perspective is Digg.com. Try searching credit unions. One of the items that has a high level of "diggs" has something to do with a credit union leaking customer information. Is that the best we have to offer? If that is one of the sources of Gen-Y peer decision support and all they see is how credit unions leak information, then we are in trouble.
There is much more to explore here, but the bottom line is that this market has a much more broad horizon when it comes to financial service options. We need to do more to make ourselves relevant to, and beloved by, a new generation of American consumers.
