I had lunch this week with Tim McAlpine and Gregory Krysa, and we got to talking about the amazing Young & Free Alberta campaign. It occurred to me that they broke a cardinal rule of branding – a broken rule that led to what seems to be a successful campaign.

Normally marketers want consumers to wear their brand as a badge, a la Apple or Volkswagen. Commonwealth Credit Union, who paid for and launched Young & Free “should” have created this as Young & Free Commonwealth, conveying their brand to the youth market in Northern Alberta. But they did the almost unthinkably brilliant – they took on and wore the badge of their consumers instead. By adopting the Young & Free brand, with little mention of the main credit union (and even using youngfreealberta@gmail.com as their email address, and not youngfreealberta@commonwealthcu.net) they let their main CU brand take a back seat to something with a much stronger appeal to the young people they were trying to attract. It’s hard to imagine most companies not putting their brands front and centre, and trying to shoehorn their relevance to their target.

It will be interesting to see if the Commonwealth brand appeals to those young people in Alberta who are signing up for this new product. The follow-up work will be starting to expose these new members to the Commonwealth brand, and show that they can be relevant to them moving forward.

Obviously for most campaigns our brands need to play a leading role, but here’s an example where a company let it play a more subdued role, and it may well pay off for them.