Tightwad Bank: A Lesson in Branding

Sometimes it's all in a name. Six-month-old Tightwad Bank in Tightwad, Mo., uses the double-take factor to drum up business without even trying. It hasn't spent a cent on advertising, yet it can rattle off personal and business accounts from California, New York and even Carrot River, Saskatchewan, Canada.

It's a bank without a website (although it plans to offer online banking by the end of 2008), and its 112 accounts already exceed the town's population of 63. Passing the town's name on to the bank was the draw for Don Higdon, the entrepreneur and chairman of the bank, when he purchased the then-shuttered building last year. Indeed, the unusual name has acted as a media magnet and marketing engine, resulting in a flurry of new accounts. However, the last thing Higdon intends to do is open Tightwad Bank branches cheek by jowl across America.

Instead, he'll consider a few additional Tightwad branches while maintaining his current focus on leveraging the power of the name to encourage tightwads across the country to open accounts at the two branches he presently chairs.

"It's a difficult name to forget," Higdon says. "You typically have two reactions: One is 'What? What is your name?' You're not going to get that customer. And the other [is] there's a smile on their face and they're just dying to open an account. I think that's the kind of excitement from a name that a lot of companies want to have."

He says any reaction to a name, good or bad, can help a business. 

"When you can get a measurable reaction simply from a name, your challenge of converting them to a customer is diminished substantially; then all you have to do is talk about price or size or location, and location just isn't an issue anymore."

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