The Problem With Brainstorming Most ideation sessions follow the same pattern. A room (or Zoom) full of smart people, a whiteboard, and a prompt that's vague enough to generate lots of ideas but not focused enough to generate useful ones. You walk out with a long list, a few sticky notes that made everyone laugh, and a nagging sense that none of it quite connects to what your customer actually needs. At M&T Bank, we'd done the research to understand our small business custome

The Temptation to Skip the Research When leadership gives you a growth mandate, the pressure to move is immediate. Build the campaign. Launch the product. Fix the funnel. The instinct is to start doing — and figure out the details as you go. At M&T Bank, we had that pressure. Customer growth was lagging behind competitors. Attrition was climbing. There was executive appetite to build a new engagement model for the small-to-medium business vertical, and there was no shortage o

When I joined M&T Bank's small business marketing team, we had a growth problem — and not the fun kind. New checking account acquisition was lagging behind competitors. The content we were putting out was mostly white-labeled, recycled across business lines, and not tied to any real understanding of what our customers actually needed. Executive leadership wanted a new engagement model for the small-to-medium business vertical. We had appetite and runway. What we needed was a