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I have been a multi-decade advocate for
My fascination began back in the Mesozoic era when I had my very first banking job as the branch manager of an in-store location. The management team at our Winn Dixie started calling me “Dave Griswold.”
Yes, I
The name came from the Chevy Chase character Clark Griswold in the movie “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.”
There is a famous scene in the movie when Clark turns on the outside lights on their home, the place glows bright enough to be seen from space and sparks (literally) fly.
In my case, our store manager mentioned over coffee that he encouraged his departments to decorate their areas for the holidays. But he was not impressed with their level of participation.
When I asked, “You want me to set an example?” he told me that I was free to take as many strings of lights as I wanted from the crates in their storage area.
Suffice it to say that by the time I was done, you may not have seen the glow from space, but you definitely saw it from the produce section all the way to the meat department in the back.
We immediately started hearing comments, all of them positive, from shoppers about our glowing little
Folks who we had never spoken to before suddenly felt moved to tell us they liked what we had done. Truth be told, most of them had probably never noticed our branch or given us much thought at all.
And why would they? To them, we were just another department they did not need. They already had banks and bank products and were not shopping for new ones, thank you very much.
But once our little lighting ceremony took place, we became pretty hard to miss. Our number of walk-ups for information jumped almost immediately and stayed higher even after the decorations came down.
More telling, our new account openings climbed noticeably in the weeks and months that followed.
I learned that customers respond to signs of life.
They notice effort and personal touches. They engage with places that look alive.
From that time on, I was more convinced than ever about the impact of regularly changing the appearance of our environment.
Years later, when I was working with hundreds of institutions across the country, the Dave Griswold story always resonated.
It popped into my head again recently when a good friend of mine posted aerial drone footage of the impressive displays of holiday lights and decorations placed on and around the main office of the financial institution he works for.
That location now stands out as it never has before. My friend says you can see people smiling and pointing from their cars as they drive by.
He also believes there are people who could never have told you that his office was along their normal commute who absolutely know it now.
Over the years, I have had scores of both branch managers and middle level managers tell me about the positive impact they have seen from regularly updating their environments, using creative lighting and signage, and even adding outside displays on their lawns.
That impact is not only about increased awareness in their communities. Their teams also take real pride and ownership when they are given even a small amount of freedom to add creativity and personal touches.
And I admit that in a banking world that grows more technology driven by the day, where every other column or speech or hallway conversation involves artificial intelligence, talking about branch decorating and seasonal displays can strike some people as unserious.
But here is the thing.
Online, there is endless room for everything. Infinite ads, infinite posts, infinite noise. Nothing runs out of space.
The real world is different. The physical space our branches occupy is limited and valuable.
That space can either remind the people who drive or walk past it that we exist or blend into the background like scenery.
Anything we do that brings a branch to life, anything that makes a customer take notice even for a second, is not silly or superficial.
It is serious work, yes, even if your teams have fun doing it. And it pays off.
In a world full of screens, a branch that shows signs of life is not decoration. It is differentiation.