If you’ve driven through downtown Mt. Pleasant lately, you’ve likely chuckled at one of Mercantile Bank’s new billboards. Perhaps it was the one welcoming returning Central Michigan University students with the warm message, “Welcome back students. Goodbye driving on Mission Street.”
The local humor is part of a new set of campaigns, focusing on highlighting each community’s unique characteristics. The angle is right there on the sign: “Mercantile gets it.”
According to Mercantile’s Mt. Pleasant Director of Marketing, Lori Knierim, Mercantile really does get it. “We put a lot of thought into choosing a very diverse group of employees and asked them what stands out to them about Mt. Pleasant,” she explained. This focus group included a wide variety of ages and experience levels, and included both lifelong residents of the community and transplants. Their answers were the inspiration for the new advertisements around the city.
As a Mt. Pleasant local who has now moved on to working at Mercantile’s Alma location, brainstorming for the new and ultra-localized marketing campaign was a heart-warming and nostalgic experience for Knierim. “It was awesome for me to revisit childhood memories of growing up in Mt. Pleasant and I’ve personally loved watching this campaign grow.”
The campaign does seem to be creating a buzz. “Several experienced marketing professionals have shared with me that this is the most talked-about marketing campaign they’ve ever been part of,” Knierim said. “We didn’t want to just slap the word local on a billboard. Any bank can do that," she added. “We wanted to really show our support and understanding to the community, and this campaign seems to be generating precisely the local conversation we were hoping to start.”
It turns out Mercantile Bank is not just about flashy local advertising either. This company is deeply invested in Mt. Pleasant. “We have employees on nearly every non-profit board in the community,” Knierim shared, “and we are so proud of their continued commitment.”
Employees are given the opportunity to nominate a local non-profit organization they’re involved with for the bank’s Donation Match Program several times per year. Mercantile produces a free promotional video for the chosen organization to post online to encourage donations. After the promotional period ends, the bank matches the amount of online donations made.
Mercantile has also created a program to help local school kids retain reading skills over summer vacation. Many children simply don’t have access to books at home, so the bank partnered with United Way to create literacy kits to distribute to classrooms in Mt. Pleasant and surrounding areas at the end of the school year. “We met with local educators to ask about their needs and literacy was at the top of the list,” Knierim explained. “With the help of our employees, who spent hours volunteering their time, we were able to give out over 1,000 kits to help keep local kids reading over the summer last year.”
Though the literacy kit and Donation Match programs both started just last year, Knierim says both are slated to become permanent fixtures at Mercantile. “We truly love showing how much we care about this community.”
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