4: Unleashing growth with the ‘yes, and’ strategy with Jenn Garbach, CMO at PNC Bank

Jen, would you introduce yourself? Yep, my name is Jen Garbach. I am the Chief Marketing Officer for PNC Bank. Well, Jen, welcome to the show. Thanks so much, glad to be here, Alan. Yeah, I'm excited about this conversation too. Before we get started into talking about your career, I hear you were a cart jockey at a grocery store growing up. You have to tell me what that was. Tell me about your first job. it wore one of those bright yellow vests that said helping hands and I was a cart pusher.

For Wegmans, so for the folks who don't know Wegmans was a kind of regional supermarket that started in upstate New York and Rochester where I'm from they're expanding everywhere I'm like a raving brand advocate, but I started with a really unglamorous job You know that the summers in high school or a push carts empty trash you know, help customers get their groceries into their, the trunks of their car, and eventually worked my way up to being a cashier before I worked in the bakery.

So, you know, humble beginnings. Yeah, I never got to be a cashier. did the bagging groceries and to this day I'm a very strong critic of bagging groceries. I don't know about you, but. Rightfully so.

I do. I am a little bit judgy in line over the precision of scanning, lining up barcodes to enhance how quickly you can scan. And then there's a strategy for packing those bags, the weight distribution, cans, produce on top. So yeah, it's a real skill. Compliment your local cashier if they do a good job. For sure. For sure. For sure. Well, let's talk about your path. So from, from cart days to grocery stores to real jobs in the real world, I guess, post college, I should say.

What, what was your path? You're now the CMO at PNC bank, but like, where'd you get your start? What were kind of some of the chapters along the way? Yeah, well, we share a little bit of our background in that I started my professional career out of undergrad at Deloitte Consulting.

So I joined in the Boston office back in the day, I shan't say how long ago, but did the traditional tour through the junior analyst and consulting ranks, which were really fantastic experience where you get a ton of exposure, a ton of access in those early kind of learning skills, but really tapped into something I didn't realize of my love of large-scale problem solving.

And I think that's one of the fun parts about being in consulting is that you get to go into other clients and businesses and start to unpack what's the big problem, what's the

big challenge. So I spent four years with Deloitte, across healthcare, financial services, traveling all over. And like any good consultant, got sick of planes, trains, and automobiles and went back to business school. So I went down to Duke and did my MBA at Fuqua, where I focused on finance and strategy. Coming out of that program, landed one of the post MBA rotational programs at Thomson Reuters, did business and product strategy.

Awesome experience when you get to rotate across so many different parts of businesses. And one of the first experiences I had truly operating in a global company and having the opportunity to work abroad. So that was a really fun tour stop, but a great development experience, I'd say as well. And then from there, I joined Capital One, where I spent over a decade of my career. And that really started the transition into the marketing portion of my journey.

So I worked across every part of Capital One's retail and direct bank, post-ING acquisition, moved over into their card business, sporting small business card, brand and acquisition marketing, the upmarket card business, where you've got the venture silver, quick silver behemoths. And at the time we were launching, Venture X. And that's really where I say unpacked and found my love of leading large scale transformation efforts.

So it was both really starting to dial into, know, Capital One is a behemoth in card marketing and a very brand and marketing forward organization. So honed a lot of those skills, but also really found a passion for being part of leading those large transformative efforts. And at the end of a decade, found myself in the COVID era where lots of folks were considering their next great opportunities.

And I was fortunate to land a really cool role with PayPal leading their marketing transformation operations team. Spent over a year doing that. And then this fantastic current opportunity popped up to lead PNC's marketing efforts. So came here after a bit of a... I'd say a little bit of a zigzag journey, kind of accumulating a bunch of general management and marketing experiences, but all in that vein of leading transformations of the from to of what's possible.

And that's really been the journey here at PNC and been a fantastic part. Couldn't be happier to have landed where I am. Well, a lot of times when people are taking new jobs, they come in with like a mission or a charter. Was there something like that? Like a, a goal that you were tasked with right out of the gate? Yeah, was clear, like coming into PNC, what was abundantly clear was that we had an opportunity to really elevate and modernize the marketing organization here.

But like really acutely, prominent focus was the organization knew that we needed to take a new approach to our brand. And so the bigger opportunity is modernizing the marketing organization. But the very immediate goal was we need to relaunch our brand. So that was a pretty fun. problem statement and aspiration to walk into. Yeah, I mean, for a 160 year old organization, if I got my history right, what's involved in launching a new brand? Like, how do you get started?

It's lots of stakeholders, I would imagine. Yep. It's big. It's daunting for anyone who has been there and led through that. Launching a rebrand is not for the faint of heart. But I will say, first, it started with an organizational recognition that we need to do something different. PNC is the sixth largest bank in the US. We've been on a tremendous growth trajectory the last many years. We're a really stable, reliable banking foundation.

But we're not quite or historically hadn't quite been breaking through in the marketplace signaling the national scale and capabilities that we bring to market.

So the first thing is I walked into a set of circumstances that were welcoming and ready to undertake this brand transformation. And then the second part of doing that was it starts with a really healthy dose of introspection, right?

So coming in as a new leader, there was this beautiful kind of symbiotic need as I came up to speed on PNC and learned the stakeholders and the culture that allowed me to go on a listening tour, both just to learn about PNC as a whole, but use that as my learning about how we talk about who we are as an organization and serve as some of the early insights that then led to our new positioning, our new brilliantly boring branding.

But yeah, was a really fun opportunity, but it's one that... really has taken a lot to unpack and sell in a pretty bold new positioning for us. Well, let's talk about the work. So it's got a tagline, I guess, for lack of a better way to describe it, of brilliantly boring. And to talk about yourself in kind of like this self-deprecating way is one, kind of funny for a bank, but two, like, where did that, where'd that come from?

Yep, brilliantly boring since 1865. Well, again, it started with one, knowing that in a world where we're up against really big, know, incumbent banks who are significantly larger than us, we're outspent. We didn't have like a distinctive edge in narrative. We knew that we were looking to thread the needle with, you know. How much are we similar to those big banks, which we are in terms of our services, our capabilities, but then how are we really different from those banks?

Some in the good, which is we're extremely relationship based. We serve our clients really well, but some challenging. Again, we don't have the budgets, the spend to compete in that same way from a marketing standpoint. So how do we thread the needle and go right in the middle and say like our tactic to really differentiate is to tell a story about who we are that can't sound like any other bank that's out there.

And as we went through this listening tour with our executives, a lot of different team members, and asked about what makes PNC special, the two things that really emerged were, one, there was this empathy advantage. Folks talk about the real authentic commitment to building relationships, serving our customers and our clients in the truest form. And then there's this dialogue that would emerge around being true to ourselves of our conservative risk profile, how we manage the business.

And oftentimes people would end the interview with this little shrug of the shoulders and be like, I don't know, we're just kind of boring. And it came up enough that hearing that as a brand marketer, you're like, there's a nugget there. There's a real insight about how this being boring is actually our superpower.

so working with Arnold Worldwide, who's our agency of record and our really talented team here, kind of turn that into nobody else is going out there telling some story about how they are a boring bank and how boring really unlocks brilliant outcomes. And that felt like a really ownable, unique space. And so that was the genesis of brilliantly boring since 1865. We are a bank that has been around for 160 years.

We were steady, we were reliable, and we're proud to wear that boring as a badge of honor and help tell everyone what that's gonna enable for them when they come engage with us. I think I even saw some, some situations where executives were walking around at the launch with like chief boring officer tags on there. That's right. We've got brilliantly boring t-shirts. So you know, you've had a little bit of a cultural truth.

Like we had a big launch moment internally, but literally like the number one selling item in our brand store online internally is the brilliantly boring t-shirt. And so we say like, it's the ability to quite literally wear that badge with pride. And I love seeing it show up in all sorts of like internal, internal chachki and whatnot. So it's really, it's struck a chord, right? For folks that. It speaks to, it's not just an advertising campaign.

You can go talk to anyone at PNC and whether you work in, you know, data, credit risk management, operations, like there are all these components of what we do that live into this boring philosophy of being right, steady and reliable and looking out for our customer and what that. enables us to deliver, right? Are the either brilliant experiences or set our customers and clients up for the things that they want to do so brilliantly in their lives and their businesses.

So it's been a very fun journey, an unexpected one, albeit, I don't know that I had my money on saying I was going to launch a boring brand, but it's been probably one of the things I'm most proud of in my career. And it's been a ton of fun along with the hard work to get here.

Yeah. Well, I think, you we've, you and I have talked about this before, but you think about marketing as kind of an iceberg, floating in the, in the water and you're, we've been talking about is getting the stuff at the very top of the surface, the stuff that everyone sees, getting that right, getting that launched. As you think about marketing and maybe the stuff that's below the waterline, where is, where does marketing need to go now, at PNC?

Yeah, it's truly like the tip of the iceberg analogy is the most appropriate one of we've packaged up this beautiful platform and narrative that we can go forward with. And then it's building that whole ecosystem underneath of, you can't just go out with a really funny, creative ad campaign and hope that it's going to do the job.

You have to live your brand every single day and the products, services, experiences that we're bringing to market. So there's more to be done as we continue to elevate and create what I call the tentacles of the brand internally. And then within the marketing engine itself, you hear me use that word engine, that's really the aspiration.

Moving from a place where we've maybe operated as a delivery function and moved things through the existing process and ecosystem and really reposition marketing as an investment for growth, marketing as an engine to drive business outcomes.

So we're looking heavily at the internal capabilities, the process, the data, all of our measurement infrastructure to make sure that we are upping the rigor, upping the understanding of how we are a data-driven marketing organization, producing insights that tie to our marketing strategies, and ultimately creating the accountability that the strategies that we deploy throughout the entire

funnel are ones that are driving business impact in the short and long term, and that we have the ability to learn from that, to report back on what's working, what's not, and make the case for further investment and growth for the business. So it's really trying to build, you know. We're the quintessential, we're driving the car while we're rebuilding the engine right now. So there's a real delicate balance in how we do that, but it's a very fun kind of leadership challenge.

And the team's been fantastic, really rising to the occasion as we undertake this. Hmm. Well, it's a lot of work. mean, all the things that you're talking about, the process, the engines that you're trying to build. The thing that I do love about talking to you about marketing is that marketing is a big meaning it is actually driving growth. It's not just the pretty pictures and the wallpaper, if you will.

And you're driving a lot of considerable change that's going to help the enterprise grow going forward. And you've talked about yourself as a change agent in multiple instances as you were going through your career, like Capital One, PayPal, and now PNC.

How do you, like as you step back and you maybe reflect or thought to other folks, like how do you think about people and how do they become a great change agent for an organization? Yeah. mean, I'll start by saying like, for me, I think there's just a fundamental thing that I'm motivated by, which is seeing driving big improvements and change. get really excited about working with a team and, you know, conquering the proverbial Everest. Like we want to go climb the mountain together.

We're going to have to train, assemble the right team, get all the right gear, like, and go do that together. That is not a a one person show climbing up in Everest together. I think that's one, just a bit of my wiring and I really enjoy that it's not just about getting to the summit, it's like the process that we go about and the collective victory of when we're all standing up there together. Like, gosh, that's a really proud moment when we get to take our selfie from the top of the summit.

There are a couple of things I reflect on learning about like how how I have found success in doing that and how I've sharpened the toolkit, so to speak. One of those that's really important from a marketing perspective has been really adopting more of a general manager's mindset and recognizing that it can be very easy to get caught in all the jargon and the internalisms of marketing of... how the marketing process works, what advertising looks like, how creative looks like.

And while lots of folks in the business love to be on the receiving end of that and see that, it's not ultimately actionable to them of the difference between those strategies. And so it's really understanding, I need to serve as a translator. Right. It's actually my job to understand the business outcomes that my business partners are on the hook for and how I can tie marketing strategies to drive those outcomes.

So I think a lot about using data and math, frankly, as our common language of what are our KPIs? Like what does success look like? You know, growing deposit accounts this year. What does. Alan, I'm pausing for a moment. I just had a pop up. Am I still on with you? Yeah, yeah, you're still here. sorry, just didn't know if I think just kind of okay. Shall I restart? Yeah, you can back up just a little bit if you want. I'll make a quick note why you, why you start.

I'm trying to remember where I was now. I think one of the big pieces of that is finding that common language of what are the KPIs, what are the outcomes we're trying to drive? It's understanding that growth for a bank is measured in deposit accounts, balances, card relationships, depth of relationship. Not necessarily, not everyone can wrap their heads around what it takes to drive brand awareness and spend and brand equity and those things.

So serving as the translation layer to help folks see this is the work that we are doing in order to drive your business outcomes. And when we've been able to have those conversations, it's really built sponsorship from... our business partners and when our business partners become advocates for the work that we're doing, it creates the virtuous cycle for further investment.

It's a lot more fun, but it's also where I just come back to, again, the backbone of that is having really good marketing measurement. If I can't create that accountability and tell you whether the work I'm doing, the dollars I'm spending are driving impact. it's what I call jazz hand marketing. I'm just kind of waving my hands and hoping you're gonna believe the impact and you can only get by on that for so long for borrowed credibility until you have to be able to show the real impact.

So I think that's been one of the biggest learnings from the CMO seat, so to speak. Yeah, no, that makes sense. mean, two things I might add just about you as a person, because we've worked together a little bit, is your philosophy on yes and is a magical pivot for conversations. And then the other thing is just your infectious like energy. You will, it's hard not to be your friend, Jen. Like I don't... I don't know how else to say it.

Yeah. if I can work that into like a year-end review retroactively, but I'd like to cite that as a proof point. But thank you. No, I think that's it. I reflect on, I want to have fun with what I'm doing at work, right? And I define fun as it's the culture and the people I work with, but it's also, I define fun as... I like having big problems, big challenging problems to have to break down. So I think that's some of the energy that comes in of I just, enjoy doing that.

And I love that you called out yes and it's, that's one of those improv tactics. If anyone's done an improv. know, workshop or brought one of those into work. It's the fundamental premise of you got to keep building from what other people offer. And I think it's one of the most broadly applicable.

strategies for building relationships because it truly isn't about shutting down other ideas and saying no. You can still be saying it has to happen in different circumstances, but you start with the yes of yes, it's a great idea and this is when we can get it done. Yes, it's a great idea and here's what I need to be able to do that for you. And it's opened a lot more doors to keep the conversation moving forward. And if I go back to that continued transformation,

for PNC marketing from a delivery function to a growth engine. That's helping us as a team move from a place where it's a lot of no's because we haven't been set up to deliver on that. We haven't had the capabilities and into a forward leaning posture of yes, we can do that because we're owning our own destiny and all the changes that we are building for ourselves so that we can be drivers of growth. We can be high impact partners. So thanks for recognizing yes and. I love it. love it.

Well, one of the things we like to do on the show is get to know you a little bit better. We know you like to ride around on shopping carts. Curious how that's going to work out with your mom life and later with kids and them trying to do the same thing. But we'll leave that to the side. The question I like to ask everyone that comes on the show is like, has there been an experience of your past that defines or makes up who you are today?

You know, I go back to one that once again, I am not going to date myself, but for a while ago, when I was in undergrad at Boston College, I had the opportunity to study abroad for six months and I did that in Quito, Ecuador. And it is continuously like one of those experiences I go back to as a quintessentially like formative experience. Why? So many reasons. One, I went from, you to a third world country to study abroad. I lived with a host family. I spoke Spanish with them every day.

I took classes in Spanish. I stuck out like a sore thumb. You can't get this through a podcast, but I'm a particularly tall woman. I think on average, I'm at least like six to eight inches taller than the average Ecuadorian. So literally on every dimension, I stood out like while I was there. And I feel like it was this amazing learning opportunity for me in adaptability. Learning how to converse with a host family.

You can take years of Spanish academically and then you show up with a host family and you're trying to explain that like the hot water doesn't work in the shower and like you're fumbling for the right words. know, learning how to navigate your way on public transportation and in taxis.

And I feel like what I walked away with is I am a very high energy, high intensity person and I distinctly recall like the kind of some moments of like, this is the universe helping me teach, like teach me patience and

adaptability that it's worth looking at this through another perspective. you know, that is truly just one of those experiences of like I lived in a totally different environment than, you know, what I was used to day to day, but. helped me, reflect on that, of being adaptable, then starting my career in consulting and learning how to be much more malleable and receptive to other perspectives, seeing just a different slice of life and things through other people's perspectives.

So it's one I've really carried with me. I look back with like tons of fond memories, but I think was a really core just learning experience. So I think that's probably the one that I think of most when you ask that. Awesome. Well, if you were starting this journey of career and life all over again, what advice would you give your younger self? Someone summed this up for me in the bumper sticker advice later on, but I would go back and say, nobody else is thinking about you as much as you are.

And there's like a great take to that and a tough take to that. The great take to that is advocate for yourself.

Nobody else is thinking about you as much as you are. if you want... that job, that promotion, that thing, like advocate for yourself. Don't assume other people are spending that much time thinking about you. And on the flip side, nobody's thinking about you that much. So give yourself a break, right? You know, something goes wrong, like let it roll off a little bit.

You know, we carry that meeting that didn't go well, that interaction that was wonky, seldom are they life-changing and something other people are carrying through. that's been one that I like to, and even now I just remember like, nobody's thinking about me as much as I am. And that's okay, I think that's sort of the greener good. I don't think people need to think about me that much. Yeah, I didn't agree with that in general.

Well, is there a topic you think marketers need to be learning more about now or maybe something you're trying to learn more about yourself? You know, the one I'm spending a good amount of time on, and forgive me for sounding semi-cliche here, I'll try to nuance it, AI preparedness. I have a love-hate relationship, and we've talked about this, Alan, I have a love-hate relationship with all of the obsession and conversations over AI and marketing.

The thing I'm really trying to learn more about is how can I, how can my team, how can we be more ready for this nebulous future where there's actually a complete lack of clarity of what that's going to look like when the AI takes over. I absolutely believe that it is an attainable future. I operate in a regulated industry where there are lots of constraints about how we will continue to adopt like generative AI in particular.

And so thinking about Okay, we may not be ready to adopt and move into all sorts of new capabilities just yet, but there are certainly things that we can be doing to prepare as a team and make sure that we are learning and up leveling and creating the conditions of success for when we are ready to move in and start adopting some of that technology. And I'll tell you it.

It honestly feels like the place that there's like a gap in the conversation because there's a lot that's forward looking, painting the big picture of how utopian marketing is going to be when we're all using all of these new capabilities and platforms. But I also know from the journey we've all lived through over the last 20, 30 years of marketing evolution, that always comes with, here's how the roles are evolving, here's how the skills are evolving, and how can we learn from that and prepare?

So that's a place I'm just trying to spend more time on. The really pragmatic, one foot in front of the other. How can we get smarter collectively? How can we get ready? Right, right. Yeah. And I agree with you. I mean, there is a lot of AI in the universe right now, uh, and in the marketing lexicon, if you will. And I think to your point, a lot of folks are at that stage of trying to figure out how to be prepared.

Um, there's various ways to use it back office. Um, I think front of office is still got a little bit of ways to go, although it's coming. It really depends on the sector or industry that you're in, how fast you're to be able to move to because of regulation. So yeah, it's tricky one to figure out, if you're sitting idle, that's the worst thing that you could be doing right now. So yes, yes.

that's the other thing is in it's continuing to live through or lead through the ambiguity of like, you just don't know when the moment's going to arise. So how do you set yourself up for having the best chances for success when, you know, one day like the, permission is granted. organizational readiness is there of like, let's go. We can't just be thinking then about like, ha ha wish we had wish we'd been planning for this.

But you know, there's a you can over prepare to we're planning for the the unknown. Well, are there any trends or subcultures that you follow you think other people should take notice of? Well, I'll give you one that's really timely and it'll depend on our timing of when you actually release this podcast, Alan, but I am really enjoying the Super Bowl frenzy right now. And of course, you know, all of our feeds are blown up with, you know, what are we expecting with all of the ads?

But the, the one that I'm that really caught my attention was the tracking of Super Bowl ad performance and general likability. So Ad Age had something out like this week on increasingly Super Bowl ads are becoming less and less likable. And it does a bit of a throwback to the golden era, so to speak, of the early 20-aughts of when there was just a lot more kind of creativity, lot more risk. And things feeling a little bit more boilerplate.

So I'm interested there to see what's going on, because I think there's like a broader reflection of the, know, macro environment we're in today where a lot of folks are like threading the needle. take even like recent days out of that, that it's felt like a little bit of a trend of recently, the last couple of years, you know, watching the Super Bowl of ads and what's

really breaking through anymore? What's falling flat? What's just expected? So I'm... I'm eager to see some of the data and measurement on the other side of this year. And I'm curious if we're going to hit any point of inflection in how that's showing up for like how folks are thinking about, know, truly, is that the hallmark moment for a brand? Is that the place to be showing up? Who is it for? So I've got the Super Bowl on my mind.

I love it don't have skin in the game for the actual game itself, so I gotta have something to look forward to. Yeah, exactly. I mean, as a marketer, it's like the one time in the year. Well, maybe there's a couple now like Grammys and things like that. like one time in the year where you're really looking forward to watching some ads. So thank you now on ads. But me too. Me too. This will come out after that.

So those that are listening, you'll have already seen all the great work that's out there. We'll come back to it at some point in the future on the podcast, I'm sure. Well, last question for you. What do you feel like is the largest opportunity or threat facing marketers today? think it's the combination of the pace of change of data, technology, privacy, and also the just constant change in the regulatory privacy landscape. I think that's both opportunity and threat.

So you knew I was going to double edge this one, Alan, of I think one, if you're not ready and building agility into your marketing strategy or marketing capabilities, like all the underlying mechanics of how you run your engine, we're going to get caught flat footed, right? Not being able to respond to that. Now, the flip side of that is if you can build, if we can build that marketing engine with agility, I think there's a ton of opportunity to learn.

And I think the kind of like what winning looks like is the ability to really be on the forefront from a customer's perspective of managing privacy, preference, personalization, all those dynamics. But I think that's the biggest challenge right now is there's so much that we have access to as marketers.

There's the veritable playground of data and insights and personalization, but also at a time where all of those same things that we want to activate on are under the microscope for privacy and access and folks wanting to throttle what they can do. So I think that's just gonna continue to be a you know, a needle that we have to thread. I think building, again, building for agility will be an advantage. And those who aren't, I think are gonna be.

in a world of hurt as it's really hard to then be on the receiving end of all of those changes if you can't build in the adaptability. Yeah, no, I tend to agree with you. Well, Jen, thank you for coming on the show. It's been awesome. for having me. This has been fun.