PERFORMANCE IS YOUR BRAND ON THE 'NET

Will the day ever come when you can get a mortgage by going to googlemortgage.com or yahoomortgage.com? Maybe so, maybe not - but if you try those URL addresses, you'll verify that nobody else is using them. Google and Yahoo retain plenty of lawyers to defend their brands in all markets.

Brand counts enormously on the Internet. "Google" has become a common verb coined to describe find information on the Web. If you don't remember who starred in "The Deer Hunter," for example, you just Google it. It takes a few seconds to verify that Robert DeNiro starred and Christopher Walken played the Russian roulette addict.

In the mortgage arena, LendingTree has cachet similar to Google's. If someone starts reciting the LendingTree slogan, "When banks compete," anyone within hearing distance is likely to chime in to finish it by mumbling "you win."

A company that gets a third of its mortgage leads from LendingTree is goodmortgage.com, currently licensed in just 13 states but hard at work branding itself to do business nationwide. "Marketing and getting customers to come your way has to be the secret sauce for mortgage websites," said goodmortgage.com founder and president Keith Luedeman. The Charlotte, N.C.-based Internet mortgage banker has the bona fides of a hard charger. A Deloitte Rising Star, it is listed among the North Carolina Technology Fast 50 and the Fast 500 Growth Companies in North America.

The company was founded in 1999 using the slogan "Internet Mortgage Lenders" to tout Web convenience for prospective borrowers. "Then we went through a rebranding process, starting with a new logo, a 'g' with a house inside it," he reports. goodmortgage.com has that logo on all the polo shirts, pot holders and mouse pads you'd expect an ambitious company to be spreading around.

As an Internet specialist, goodmortgage.com stresses utilizing advanced technology to enable consumers to get lower rates on purchase and construction loans, refinancing, home-equity lines and second mortgages "from the convenience of their own homes."

To support that business model and all the requisite self-service tools, mortgage calculators, loan statusing and coordination with live mortgage counselors, says Mr. Leudeman, the site boasts over a thousand pages. goodmortgage.info is the company's loan status site serving customers and real estate agents. By offering that site and automatically sending out information via e-mail, "Our incoming calls have dropped dramatically," Mr. Luedeman said.

Today goodmortgage.com supports its brand with a new trademarked slogan, "Where Loans Click." Counting clicks is a basic metrics for successful websites. You want to give visitors the shortest route to the outcome they seek. That means positioning them always to be one click, two at most, away from navigating to any other page on your website. "One click to an application, one click to have a loan specialist call you," he notes.

There is a double entendre in "Where Loans Click" that goes over well with his borrowers, Mr. Luedeman says. "When something clicks, it's going very well. Satisfied customers tell us, 'Wow, my loan really did click with you guys.' When something goes wrong, someone will tell us, 'Hey, things aren't clicking.' As a brand we've actually found that 'Where Loans Click' sticks better than goodmortgage.com," he stated.

Nevertheless, to support the squeaky clean image goodmortgage.com implies, Mr. Luedeman says he wants to make sure the company retains its perfect record of never having been the subject of a complaint to the Better Business Bureau.

He has registered the URLs for all the obvious misspellings of his brand name as well, he says. "If you type in goodmortage with only one 'g' you still get there."

"Click" is a term too generic to trademark away from all other users, of course. A Google search on "one-click access" reveals nearly 17 million hits.

ClickMortgage.ca provides discounted wholesale rates from 50 Canadian financial institutions. "Satisfaction in a Click" is the slogan of Boca Raton, Fla.-based United Mortgage Lenders uses to brag about the power of its new bulls-eye decisioning system built with Mindbox's ARTOptimize technology. An article about Mountlake Terrace Wash.-based MILA in the June 2006 edition of Seattle Business Monthly is entitled "One-Click Mortgage Banking."

While branding is particularly vital with customer-facing websites, wholesalers have to support their brand with their broker customers as well. Technology powerhouse MILA (Mortgage Investment Lending Associates) builds its slogan "The RIGHT Way" around yet another acronym, in this case to highlight a set of service-level promises to its broker customers. RIGHT = Reliability, Innovation, Growth, Honor and Technology.

WMC Mortgage offers its WMC Direct website under the banner "A GE Money Co.," leveraging its June 2004 acquisition by GE as subliminal reassurance that this is one subprime wholesaler unlikely to encounter capital market-related challenges in times of bad financial weather.

WMC's slogan is "Innovative Ideas for Mortgage Professionals." WMC Direct backs up that slogan with a rich variety of tools and services, including enabling brokers to pre-qualify borrowers from anywhere with a BlackBerry or other PDA. Its free broker and loan officer boot camp seminars offer marketing strategies and ways to build business with real estate agents. The site includes a nifty demo on uploading files from Calyx Point.

Right now Irvine, Calif.-based Argent Mortgage brands its Argent University as "Exclusive, Powerful, Online" and "Brand Spanking New." Launched to help its approved brokers "enhance their professional skills and build their businesses," the online university is powered by CampusMBA, the educational arm of the Mortgage Bankers Association. For a single price of $350, Argent U. offers 12 months of 24/7 online access to more than 50 online courses, for the single price of $350. Argent said its researches show that total price as about $100 below the advertised cost of one typical Web-based course.

One way that Argent.com differentiates Argent U. from classes offered on other broker-facing portals is its courses have nothing to do with tutorials on its own Loan Genius and Prequal Wizard or instructions on making online loan submissions. The brand Argent hopes to build is as the broker's best friend and resource.

None of these branding efforts were formulated on a long weekend. The advantage a lender can gain from undertaking a serious brand-building effort goes beyond mere slogan creation. Once you pick a slogan, it marks you. "Hey, look me over," you are telling the world. If your slogan doesn't match what you actually deliver, you have a clear incentive to live up to your own hype.