Designing a Clear, Trusted Voice for a Regional Financial Institution
Coastline Bank
Helping a local bank speak with confidence—internally and externally
Coastline Bank, the Mid North Coast’s local credit union, had strong ambition for the future.
Its products were competitive, its role in the community was meaningful, and leadership wanted the brand to reflect the scale of what the institution was becoming.
But the way the bank communicated did not yet match that ambition.
Messaging was fragmented across channels, overly technical, and difficult for customers to interpret. Internally, teams were not fully aligned on how to speak about the bank’s value.
Externally, customers struggled to clearly understand products and services—weakening trust and differentiation in an increasingly crowded financial market.
The challenge was not visibility.
It was clarity.
Our Role
HashtagOne partnered with Coastline Bank to redesign its marketing and communication system—aligning internal culture, leadership intent, regulatory realities, and customer understanding into one coherent voice.
Our role was not to create more content, but to design a shared communication logic that the organization could rely on as it grew.
Outcome
Over time, communication across the bank became more consistent, confident, and understandable.
Customers gained clearer understanding of products and services
Messaging became aligned across channels and touchpoints
Internal teams operated with greater confidence and coordination
Marketing and compliance worked from the same foundation
A scalable communication system was put in place to support future growth
Most importantly, the bank began to speak with one clear, trusted voice.
What we did
Understanding how communication really worked
We began by examining how the bank communicated in practice. Marketing materials, product messaging, customer touchpoints, and internal communications were reviewed as one system.
This diagnostic revealed where messages conflicted, where complexity crept in, and where regulatory caution had unintentionally obscured clarity.
Rather than treating these as isolated issues, we focused on how they interacted.
Clarifying the narrative
Working closely with leadership, we clarified the bank’s strategic narrative—what it stood for, who it served, and how it wanted to show up in the lives of its customers.
This narrative became the foundation for a clearer value proposition—one that balanced ambition with trust, and simplicity with regulatory responsibility.
Designing a communication system that could scale
From there, we designed a unified communication architecture covering brand, product, and service messaging.
This system was built to:
support clear customer understanding,
meet regulatory and compliance requirements, and
be used consistently by different teams over time.
Content and campaign frameworks were created not as one-off executions, but as repeatable structures the bank could continue to use as it evolved.
Aligning the organization around one voice
Finally, we worked to align marketing, compliance, and leadership teams around this shared logic.
By creating clarity at the system level, teams gained confidence—knowing how to communicate without second-guessing, and how to balance clarity with control.