Larry Neary – ‘A special breed’

Most community banks are engaged in a delicate balancing act these days. They have always had local appeal and good customer service, but with mega-mergers in New England spawning bigger and bigger banks, their focus must shift slightly if they want to compete with the convenience and many products offered by banking behemoths.

One Connecticut marketing professional is poised to help them do that. Larry Neary, who in 1977 founded Brookfield-based Marketing Resources Inc., a marketing firm that specializes in working with financial institutions, was recently elected as co-president of the ABA Marketing Network’s New England chapter. His company counts five Connecticut community banks as its clients, and with his new appointment, Neary hopes to help community banks across the region compete with giant financial institutions like Bank of America that are becoming more common in New England.

The ABA Marketing Network was previously known as the Bank Marketing Association, but teamed up with the American Bankers Association several years ago. Its aim is to educate marketing professionals and keep up with current trends, according to the association’s other co-president, Susan Lapierre, who is vice president at East Cambridge Savings Bank in Massachusetts.

“Our key is to stay true to our mission,” she said.

The association has more than 300 members, most of whom work for community banks throughout New England. So staying on top of the competition from big banks is one of members’ priority issues.

“Our strength [at community banks], generally, is our people,” Neary said. Local banks also have other advantages over big banks. If a customer of a local bank has a question or a problem, they can often speak directly with a banker they know, while customers of bigger banks often have to call 800 numbers, where they either listen to automated responses or an operator who handles hundreds of calls a day.

So part of the mission of marketing people at small banks is often to talk about those differences when trying to capture market share, Neary said. Small banks also tend to be very community-oriented and philanthropic. Many community bankers participate in charitable events and organizations.

“It’s the kind of thing [where] we have to talk about that difference,” Neary said. “There are people like me who really want personal service Â… Beyond that, we have to learn how to be sales-driven.”

That can be one of the most difficult parts. Banks have historically concerned themselves with satisfying customers’ needs and not necessarily on marketing themselves. But to compete now, they must.

“It’s a culture that’s 100 years old. It takes awhile to turn that ship around,” Neary said. “It’s all about competing successfully.”

‘Magic’ Moments

The ABA Marketing Network also educates its members on other issues during its three education sessions, which are often accredited, every year. This year’s sessions offer topics like “How to negotiate with different personalities” and “Why hating one’s bank has replaced baseball as the national pastime.” The network also has a Web site where marketing professionals can ask questions of their peers and see up-to-date news.

Since many marketing departments at financial institutions have gotten smaller while the workload has gotten bigger, marketing professionals often are under a lot of stress. Many carry all of the marketing responsibilities for their bank and therefore don’t have peers in their organization with whom to share ideas. And when a marketing professional has a new idea, it often entails more work for people in different departments of the bank.

“Marketing people are a special breed,” Neary said.

So the ABA Marketing Network’s sessions offer bank marketing specialists a place to network and ask questions of others in the business.

“Getting away with a bunch of their peers revitalizes them,” Neary said.

There are also other issues marketing professionals have to deal with, aside from the issue of mega-mergers and competing with the giant banks that come with them, although that issue does come with a lot of responsibility for people in marketing.

“Market share is critical for banks to stay on top of,” Lapierre said. “It really puts a lot [of responsibility] on the marketing people.”

Neary recently celebrated 35 years in the marketing business, and says he still loves it. He knew he wanted to go into marketing when he was six years old and starting visiting his father’s ad agency in the 1950s.

“I grew up knowing what I wanted to do,” Neary said. “Back then, for a kid, it was so glamorous.”

His father and other advertising associates would sit him at the art table and teach him to sketch or to draw Mickey Mouse. Neary loved the cutting and pasting that went into creating advertising materials at the time.

“It was sort of like being in kindergarten,” he said. “To me it was magic.”

He was also a model for some of his dad’s ads, like one for Keds footwear.

After high school, Neary still wanted to go into marketing. At the time, there were only five universities in the country that offered marketing as a course of study, and Neary picked the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fla. After he graduated, he had a stint in the Army and worked briefly for Nestle Corp. before going back into business with his father. It was there that he developed a liking for financial institutions.

Neary said he liked working with bankers because they were usually decent people doing decent things, and were often very involved in their communities. He continued to work with them for years, and when his father retired in the late 1970s, he opened his own business that specializes in marketing for financial institutions, although it has clients in many different industries.

Some of Marketing Resources’ clients include Stamford-based First County Bank, Milford Bank, Newtown Savings Bank, Thomaston Savings Bank and Enfield Bank.