As of the last week of September 2008, JPMorgan Chase owns Washington Mutual, a bank known to many as WaMu. In these tricky financial rapids we are wading through now, it is one of quite a few revealing moments on the state of financial institution as we know them. From a branding perspective, I’m wondering what will happen to WaMu’s identity. Washington Mutual has spent the last several years creating a distinct and extensive brand identity to position itself as the anti-bank bank — a bank that makes you smile. WaMu stands for everything that other corporate-lingo-filled, stuffy blue-and-red banks do not. The design solutions are quite solid. The WaMu’s brand palette employs a rainbow of colors, a slew of funny images and photography, uses a contemporary sans-serif typeface (a customized version of DTL Prokyon / Dutch Type Library) and speaks in a language that makes you see banking as a simple and pleasurable part of your daily routine. That is certainly not JPMorgan Chase’s brand message, as far as I can tell.

[ Of course, at the end of the day, one can argue that all banks, more-or-less, do the same thing with your money. None of them are actually different from each other. But that would be a whole 'nother post on a whole 'nother blog. I'll leave that to someone else. In any case, I do appreciate that WaMu decided to put themselves out there in the world in a very different way than their direct competitors. That's pretty interesting to use such brand strategies in this sector. ]

I am curious to see how long we will see the color bars of WaMu’s printed materials floating around. As a brand, could WaMu exist as the colorful younger brother of Chase? Will we see a shift in Chase’s staid blue-on-more-blue-on-more-blue brand? I already feel the blue coming into play (see below). A friend linked me to this image the other day. Is this real or a spoof? note the copywriting here — its gonna be either terribly inappropriate or brilliant.