The Energizer Bunny Doesn’t Keep Going: What Credit Unions Can Learn
by Bo McDonald
Remember that fuzzy pink bunny pounding the drum in those TV commercials in the 80s and 90s? It outlasted and passed by all kinds of other devices. The bunny represented the longevity of the Energizer battery. It kept going, and going, and going…
The bunny is still around. But that drumbeat is getting softer and softer and shows signs of stopping. Energizer recently announced the closing of its plant in St. Albans, Vermont, along with others. In total, about 1,500 jobs, or ten percent of the Energizer workforce will be laid off by next September.
So what led to the downfall of this one time market leader in the battery industry? It’s the same thing that led to the breakdown of other giants such as Polaroid and IBM–a lack of innovation.
“People these days need fewer of the lithium batteries they’ve been making in St. Albans since 1989,” said Ken Fields, a spokesman for Energizer headquarters in St. Louis. “They have their smartphones, and the rechargeable batteries for those devices are already on board.” Fields went on to say that “More and more people are not using multiple devices like a pager and a camera. They’re using one rechargeable device with all those functions.”
The fact that Fields even mentioned pagers and cameras shows how out of touch Energizer is with society. And even worse, take a look at the credit union industry. We may be headed in the same direction if we don’t wake up to the facts in front of us. Many credit unions are out of touch too…still thinking in terms of pagers and cameras. It hit me just the other day as we were working on the marketing budget for one of our credit unions. We were thinking in terms of traditional media, and when we calculated the cost of the billboard campaign alone it made me sick. It was amazing to see how our team found better ways we could spend $20,000 when we started thinking outside the box.