By Frank Cho
Advertiser Staff Writer
Concerned about its lack of market identity, City Bank is launching its biggest marketing campaign in nearly a decade to strengthen its brand name and, it is hoped, lure new customers.
Starting tomorrow, City Bank plans to start a six-month, $200,000 media blitz initially directed at Hawai‘i’s small-business market.
"This positioning campaign will portray a new personality for City Bank," said Ronald Migita, the bank’s vice chairman and chief executive officer.
Migita said he hopes the personality consumers see will be one that is friendlier and more accessible than City Bank’s larger competitors.
First Hawaiian Bank’s parent company, BancWest Corp., has been rapidly expanding its Mainland operations while Bank of Hawai‘i has struggled with bad loans and poor financial performance.
"We think they have been placing their emphasis elsewhere and that could be an opportunity for us," said Wayne Miyao, a senior vice president for City Bank.
City Bank’s campaign will center on a teal-colored wooden bench, where Miyao says bankers and customers can sit together to emphasize the bank’s focus on relationship banking. The bank’s new campaign includes the phrase "It’s Worth It to Switch."
City Bank workers plan to line King Street in front of ‘Iolani Palace tomorrow afternoon with about a dozen teal benches to kick off the campaign.
The spread of nonbank institutions into financial services, especially retail, is not only increasing competition in Hawai‘i but helping to reshape attitudes about marketing and services.
"As the marketplace changes, brands have to adapt," said Charlotte Vick, a senior vice president with Starr Seigle Communications in Honolulu. Vick has extensive experience in bank marketing, but does not handle any local bank accounts.
At Laird Christianson, which developed the campaign for City Bank, creative director Dennis Christianson said the company looked for a visual device to demonstrate the bank’s relationship to its customer.
"As it turned out, the answer was sitting outside my office; a simple wooden bench," Christianson said.
City Bank said it hopes the teal bench will become its symbol throughout the Islands and that benches will be placed in the bank’s 21 branches statewide.
"Basically we wanted to position ourselves as a local bank," Miyao said.
After CB Bancshares, City Bank’s parent, merged its International Savings & Loan Association with the bank in July 2000, the company conducted a marketing study that found the bank’s identity was not strongly recognized by the public.
Experts say that as an industry, banking organizations traditionally have marketed more like car dealers and retailers: They use tactical ads that focus on specific services rather than overall image.
"We don’t just see our customers across the desk or a counter, we work together with them, next to each other, as you would when you sit on a bench," said Richard Lim, City Bank’s president and chief operating officer.
Frank Cho can be reached by phone at 525-8088, or by e-mail at fcho@honoluluadvertiser.com
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