Shanna F. Cahalane
Title: Vice President, Director of Marketing, Reading Cooperative Bank
Age: 34
Experience: 13 years

Shanna Cahalane never really thought she’d get into banking. She landed at Reading Cooperative in 2008 – during “the apocalypse of job hunting” – after the nonprofit she’d been working for was forced to close. She was inspired by the bank’s president, Julieann Thurlow, and decided to give it a shot because she thought it would be a good learning experience until the market turned around. But the job challenged Cahalane, and she came to appreciate the bank’s cooperative nature. Recently, she sat down with Banker & Tradesman to talk about freshening up a 130-year-old brand.

Q: Reading Cooperative rebranded last year. Can you walk B&T’s readers through that process and some of your reasons for doing it?

A: Well, we decided we needed to freshen the bank’s brand a couple years ago. At the time we were really curious about everything – is our name harming us in any way? Is “Reading” helping us or helping us? Is the mutuality a positive message for our audience or is it hurting us in any way? Is our color right? All the way down to remembering [that] we’ve been around for 130 years, so it was trying to keep that history, but also freshen it and attract a younger audience.

So we did a lot of research for nearly a year, polling, talking to focus groups and taking surveys with customers, employees, noncustomers, trying to figure out which of these pieces were important. Everything was on the table: do we change our name? Do we change our logo, change colors? How do we communicate who we are and what we focus on? What’s our voice going to be? Are we going to be very formal or approachable? Everything was on the table, and after doing a lot of research, we found the mutuality piece was very important to all of those people. People really got the fact that at Reading Cooperative, you’re an owner. Even the younger audience, the Millennials, really believe in cooperatives, whether it’s farm shares or crowdfunding sites. Those things are all important to our audience, so we decided that was something we really wanted to highlight.

We are a cooperative, so that means we’re going to be cooperative with our customers and we’re also going to be cooperative with each other. It sets the tone internally, too.

Q: Tell B&T’s readers about the story behind the logo, too.

A: One of the things we knew was, being 130 years in the town of Reading, a lot of our customer base is in Reading, but we have nine branches and we’re in many other towns, so we wanted to look at the Reading part of our name and determine whether it was important to keep or whether we should look for something more universal.

We found the majority of our customers still reside in Reading so we wanted to keep that, but the icon portion of our logo is shaped like the Parker Tavern, which is a historic house in Reading, and that really speaks to our Reading customers. We were created back in 1886 so that every man – at the time – could afford a home, so the house really speaks to that as well. So if you’re from Reading, maybe it’s the Parker Tavern, but if not, then it’s just the image of a home, and that’s what we were created to do. Each of the dots represent people in our community. It’s a diverse community coming together to make this house. It’s a diverse community of people coming together to be able to lend to businesses and people. That’s where the house came from.

Q: What’s next on the horizon? 

A: I would say next we’re really looking at our online channels. Technology is a really important part of banking these days. It’s certainly part of what makes banking convenient for everyone, whether you’re in one of our nine towns or not. It lets people bank with a community bank they believe in, even if it’s not necessarily next door to them. So we’ll be focusing on technology. Our website will get an overhaul. We’ve done a lot with our mobile app, but we want to make sure that things like online account opening are really smooth and there are no hurdles to becoming a Reading Cooperative customer.

Cahalane’s Top Five Spots For A Maine Lobster Roll:

1. J’s Oyster in Portland
2. Bite Into Maine, a food truck at Fort Williams Park in Cape Elizabeth
3. Barnacle Billy’s in Ogunquit
4. The Lobster Shack at Two Lights State Park in Cape Elizabeth
5. Bob’s Clam Hut in Kittery