How Other Industries Offer Inspiration to Visionary FI Leaders

By. Shazia Manus

Faced with an incredibly fast-paced and shifting marketplace, credit union and community bank leaders can and should look outside the industry for inspiration on the use of game-changing strategies.

Sports, and even politics, for instance, hold valuable case studies on the use of data analysis and audience segmentation. As described in the film Moneyball, innovative thinkers on the Oakland A’s staff used data points from player histories to arrive at new – and at times unpopular – strategies for winning baseball games. By uncovering each player’s unique strengths, managers were able to better align those assets with the ultimate objective, which for the Oakland A’s was to win more games, even with a shoestring budget for talent. It was this new way of thinking – and of reliance on data analysis – which ultimately drove strategy, creating efficiencies and bringing more value to the team’s owners.

The same can be said for the 2012 presidential campaign. Based on analyzing a myriad of data, each party’s campaign strategists understood the value of the Latino population as an influential group of voters. However, the winning campaign took it a step further, segmenting its audience and working to create relevancy in the minds of that specific voting population. It was this new way of thinking for both the game of baseball and the presidential campaign that resulted in victory, and ultimately changed the future.

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