Threading 3,000 needles. In style.

The Independent Community Bankers of America, or ICBA, has one mission: make local banks thrive. And their “Bank Locally” movement aims to do exactly that, encouraging people to bank where it boosts their community, not Wall Street. 

But it’s hard to create a movement without first creating a brand platform. And not just any platform – one that could be seamlessly adopted by any one of their nearly 3,000 member banks. So our mission was two-fold: lend emotion to a rational message, and do it in a way that any bank from LA to Topeka could implement.

A Local Glow-Up

We started with the logo design. One of our biggest guardrails was making sure we avoided the stale, corporate aesthetic that banks tend to fall into. Instead, we aimed to capture the friendliness of Anytown, USA with a casual design that takes cues from other local grassroots movements.

Assets for Anywhere

With the logo ready, we got busy creating a toolkit of social and digital assets with a fresh, energetic vibe. To make it consistent yet customizable, we provided the assets in templated buckets, each with their own strategic message. Personalized service, positive local impact, transparency – whatever message a bank would want to deliver, they’d be free to do it with their own flavor. And in grassroots fashion, we designed merch and signage so that member banks could take the movement and run with it.

Additionally, we created social-oriented video assets showing the lockup in diverse settings fit for whatever region the member bank is in.

And just like that, we made a platform adoptable for thousands of brands at once. Simple, right?