Use a 'People' Approach to Fight Tough Competition.

If you think your bank faces tough competition, Look at the situation faced by a small air carrier, Sun Country Airlines, in Mendota Heights, Minn. The airline operates out of the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, where a single competing airline controls an 80 percent market share.

How Sun Country successfully carved out a niche for itself is a lesson that could have applications for bank marketers. "We differentiate ourselves by focusing on people," says Bill La Macchia Jr., CEO. "We strive to build relationships with our customers and by offering them an experience that they can't get with other airlines."

La Macchia is scheduled to speak in October at the ABA Marketing Conference in Chicago. His topic is "The Fifth 'P' of Marketing." The normal four P's of marketing are product, price, promotion and placement. La Macchia adds a fifth: people. The airline trains its employees to be highly customer-service oriented. "We go a little beyond what is normally expected to accommodate a customer," says Macchia. "We try to be more compassionate."

Sun Country was founded in 1983 as a charter airline. The La Macchia family purchased the carrier in 1998. In June 1999, the airline began scheduled service to a dozen daily destinations. Sun Country currently offers service to more than 30 destinations in the continental United States, Mexico and Caribbean. Founded with only one aircraft, Sun Country Airlines now has a fleet of 20 jets and 1,500 employees. The company lastyear had sales of $253 million.

Bill La Macchia Jr. served as the director of hotel sales and marketing at the deluxe Golden Nugget hotel in Las Vegas before becoming vice president in 1997 at the Mark Travel Corp., Milwaukee, a La Macchia family-owned business. He was named president and CEO of Sun Country in 1998.

Sun Country advertising has personalized the airline by using Bill La Macchia as its symboL. The ads have made La Macchia into a local celebrity. Using the slogan, "An Airline for the People," ads have shown La Macchia playing piano with Grandma, licking a Popsicle with kids, flipping burgers and taking out the trash. He once toured Minnesota in a recreation vehicle emblazoned with the slogan, "Vote Sun Country."

One unique step that La Macchia took was to appoint a "can-do" coordinator at the airline terminal to assist both customers and airline employees with problems. Everything that the airline does is designed to reinforce the brand of an airline "that realty cares for people," La Macchia says. If you develop a strong relationship with customers, they are more apt to forgive you when you make a mistake, he notes.

La Macchia, who grew up in a small town in Wisconsin, says that Sun Country is proof that a small organization can hold its own against a large competitor. Once while working in Las Vegas, La Macchia won a bet in which he received a thousand $1 bills. He took the money to the large bank where he had a personal account. The teller refused to accept the money until it had been sorted into counted stacks, saying that it was "against bank policy." Irritated, La Macchia closed his account.

"Now, if I had walked into my little bank in Wisconsin, they would have done it," La Macchia says. They would have accepted the bills while laughing and joking with him about the bet he had won. "That's the secret," he adds, "developing a good relationship with the customer and showing that you care."

Bill La Macchia Jr., CEO Sun Country Airlines