Peapack-Gladstone Bank

Results

Awareness of Peapack Gladstone Bank has grown close to the levels of its much larger national rivals including Bank of America. Assets, loans, and deposits are growing at double-digit rates every year. Deposit acquisition campaigns are predictable and deliver new deposits at a marketing cost under 17 basis points per campaign.

How we helped an exclusive bank become the community’s bank.

Peapack-Gladstone Bank (PGB) is a $5-billion-asset boutique bank with a strong history of wealth management. It operates in the highly competitive “wealth belt” of New Jersey. National and superregional banks dominate regional market share in deposits and loans. Non-banks are aggressively competing for small business customers and more tech-savvy retail customers. PGB has modest marketing budgets and must make every dollar invested work to produce measurable returns. When they hired Princeton Partners in 2014, they needed a strong positioning that would make them stand out.

We recognized that PGB’s emphasis on private banking created a customer service culture that elevated its approach across all service lines. In fact, to them, all banking is private banking. That became the big idea behind a new brand platform that emphasized PGB’s delivery of quality in everything they do.

With the new tagline “All Banking Should Be Private Banking,” we updated PGB’s traditional bank branding with modern luxury branding that reinforced the ideas of integrity, trust, and client-focused service delivered by values-driven professionals.

The result has been tremendous growth for the bank, including double-digit asset growth every year (15% CAGR) since the brand debuted.

As Peapack Private enhanced their wealth management division, we helped them strengthen the commercial and retail parts of the bank through a variety of initiatives that constantly reinforced the bank’s core values. With strong branding, PGB has been able to drive greater results than ever before, like, for example, with CD deposit campaigns.

Competition in low-rate environments can make CD deposit campaigns difficult for any bank. But PGB faces an even greater challenge: investing in CDs is not always intuitive or attractive to PGB’s primary audience of high-net-worth individuals.

For PGB’s first CD deposit campaign with their new branding, Princeton Partners strategically aligned PGB’s brand positioning to the promotional CD offers and delivered the message to the marketplace through a hyper-targeted, data-driven media approach.

Messaging focused on relating PGB’s values to the CD offer. For example, lines like “Great rates are just the beginning” promote PGB’s CD rates as well as the overall growth strategy and relationship that the bank builds with its clients to help them achieve their goals. With an integrated, multi-touch media mix, we were able to alter messaging throughout the campaign based on successful engagement insights.

During the campaign’s four-week period, deposits increased 108% compared to a typical four-week period at the Bank. New money from CDs exceeded $15 million. And new account generation increased by over $72 million.

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