Banks: Consumers Fearing Job Loss May Be Great Prospects

Counterintuitive for financial services marketers, sure. But banks could really benefit from targeting consumers who are afraid of losing their jobs and never recovering from the Great Recession, because that’s 33 percent of Americans right now, research shows.

Many FinServ marketers target consumers who are on solid financial ground and tend to avoid the more at-risk ones, especially after subprime lending got much of the credit for causing the Great Recession. But in this case, the financial risk for institutions may not be so dire — because those consumers are still employed, according to a survey conducted by EMC Research for Country Financial, a group of U.S.