How to close the gap between consumer needs and your marketing strategies

Q&A: Alkami CMO Allison Cerra believes that economic stress and disruption should be creating opportunities for banks to earn the trust of their customers. But doing so requires hard work to overcome barriers from legacy technology, cultural inertia, and weak execution.

After decades of spray-and-pray marketing, financial institutions find themselves at a pivotal inflection point. “We’ve transformed from the Mad Men era to hyper-personalization at scale today,” observes Allison Cerra, chief marketing officer at digital banking platform Alkami.

Yet significant, frustrating gaps persist between new consumer expectations and technologies on the one hand and existing institutional capabilities and execution on the other. That gap, argues Cerra, is throttling bank marketing effectiveness during a time of unprecedented economic volatility.

In a recent conversation with Jim Marous, founder and CEO of the Digital Banking Report, Cerra unpacked the obstacles hampering many marketing teams, and identified the cultural shifts necessary to build trust among anxious account holders.

 

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