• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, June 28, 2012

That’s what James Mendelsohn suggested during his presentation at the Brand Marketers Summit in Kohler, Wisconsin. Mendelsohn, associate principal at McKinsey & Co., showed one of those nifty word cloud graphics with a bunch of powerful brand names on it. The word cloud, he said, was generated by a survey of executives in the financial industry, who were asked which consumer brands they most used to set their own bars.

The graphic was dominated by names like Apple, Google, and Amazon, though a fairly large-scaled Vanguard was on it too.

Mendelsohn said that the big digital brands have “set the bar” for brands in many other categories, because of their sublime “functionality,” and that apparently has carried over to financial.

And it doesn’t necessarily take a high-end brand to get those kinds of marks. Mendelsohn noted that Southwest Airlines gets high marks too.

“Southwest is a great example of the power of clear expectations from the consumer,” he said. “It doesn’t’ have to be white glove. We just have ot make the customer experience as good as It possibly can be, and that will result in a benefit.”