The Old West way: when PlainsCapital Corp., Lubbock, Texas, realized that the $2.5 billion institution needed to brand itself in order to help fuel its rapid growth, the result was a red buffalo and a visionary 'No Fences' campaign.

The bright red buffalo in the PlainsCapital Bank logo stands as a symbol of power and resilience. Print ads featuring herds of buffalo and cloud-dappled expanses of blue sky aim to conjure up images of freedom and opportunity in the American West. The images are meant to characterize the vision of a group of investors called the PlainsCapital Corp.

Created in 1987 and led by Alan B. White, the PlainsCapital Corp. has enjoyed tremendous growth, adding 10 companies in over 20 states and the Cayman Islands. A few years ago, White told Carol A. Towne it was time to bring the companies to a new level. In November 2002, he hired her as executive vice president and director of marketing. Her job was to create the corporation's first marketing department.

Over the next year, Towne developed a new brand strategy for the parent company and its subsidiaries and also directed the rollout of the corporation's first-ever brand awareness campaign. To many, it would have seemed a huge undertaking. Not if you've got a team brimming with what might have been called true grit in the Old West, but nowadays is known as entrepreneurial spirit.

Towne shared her story of building a department and a brand image with ABA Bank Marketing contributing writer Janet Bigham Bernstel.

Q: You've accomplished a great deal since you first joined PlainsCapital Corp. in 2002. What's your secret?

A: We have a very entrepreneurial environment here. I work for the chairman, Allan White, who is an entrepreneur, and entrepreneurs move quickly. Allan has ideas and doesn't want them carried out next week, but wants them carried out tomorrow. That's pretty much how we operate. I was used to it because every company I've ever worked for was entrepreneurial-based, even Freddie Mac. So I think I'm a good fit with what goes on here.

Q: How did you go about building a marketing department for a company not only mature, but also vast?

I have put together other marketing departments and had a chance to try different ways of doing things. This one was based on being as full-service and in-house as we can be and still be financially responsible.

In the past, I outsourced all writing and graphics and found that it gets entirely too expensive. I felt I could be more responsive to the needs of the company and provide a cheaper rate to have some of these services in-house.

So in terms of marketing services, I chose to hire an in-house writer and graphic artist. Our graphic artist is more like a production artist and is also very technical, so he does artwork on the website and on our new intranet. Our writer works on advertising that we create in-house. She also functions as our corporate communications manager because we're really doing two separate things here. We've got the marketing side, which we do mainly for the bank, and then we've got all the internal communications for the other companies, such as mortgage, title, etc.

I have a production manager because, even though we don't do a lot of expensive newspaper and magazine advertising, we do many very large events. Those are extremely difficult and require a level of detail that's phenomenal.

We also have our marketing research analyst function, which we've just added this year in January. Because the marketing department is so new, we're really in our infancy in terms of doing customer surveys and basic competitor research.

One thing I do, too, is use agencies for their strengths. I like to hire the experts. And not just one--it depends on what I need. I employed a lot of agencies that first year.

Q: Is that what you did for the award-winning "No Fences" campaign?

In "No Fences" we used the agency Hybrid Inc. We could never have created anything as good as that in-house. I told Hybrid from the very beginning that I wanted them to create templates for us that we would take in-house and execute our advertising moving forward.

I asked them to create a flexible design, one that we could take and manipulate in-house. Different kinds of design work better for that. It needs to be very simple and have consistent elements in terms of space and colors that a production artist can adapt. The logo was part of that, but the layout of advertising and brochures was decided upon by the agency with ideas we could copy and adjust to fit our needs. If you look at our advertising, it all has the same look and feel.

Q: Can you share some details on the evolution of the new brand strategy?

When I was hired, the company had 10 separate entities all with different names, looks and logos. And while the president believes in marketing and likes to think creatively, there was never a consistent effort. He realized he needed a new look.

Initially, there was no talk of a name change. He did tell me he wanted to keep the buffalo. For a company like ours, that doesn't spend a lot on advertising, the buffalo is so recognizable that we get a lot of recognition without having to spend a lot.

Allan suggested I go visit every location, see what's going on in all the subsidiary companies and come back with a plan.

So, first I hired a company that was good at helping corporations understand who they were and then come up with a brand statement, identity, etc. Then we put the executives from all the companies in a room for a day to do the "big picture" thing. We talked a long time about the wording to get it just right. After all, this was a corporate endeavor but the mortgage companies and the banks were often after something different. Banks are looking to build long-term relationships and mortgage companies also want to do a great job, but for the most part, their relationships with customers are not long-term. Their loans are processed and sold. So that was where we had to come together and find a common factor.

After some very spirited discussions, we had a brand identity plus the characteristics of the brand and how we wanted it carried out. We took that information and started working with two different agencies in Dallas.

One was known for logo design. The challenge here was in trying to figure out how to make these 10 companies fit together under a corporate parent. The holding company had always been Plains Capital, but I found that the original bank name, PNB [Plains National Bank] Financial, wasn't ideal. The initials often confused people, and it didn't even have the word "bank" in it. So I told Allan I thought we needed to change the name. It was a hard discussion to have because he created the name, but he took it really well. I actually think he knew it had to go.

Also, the PNB part could not be trademarked due to its common usage. We do business in many states and needed a trademarked name. Allan was against making up a name, so I suggested taking the corporate Plains Capital and using it to promote the holding company, the bank and subsidiaries as much as possible as a group with a common name. Some of the subsidiaries already had significant brand recognition, so we decided not to disrupt the entrepreneurial spirit that made them successful in the first place.

The trademark attorneys let us know that Plains was OK, but the words "capital" and "bank" were common words. So we chose to put the PlainsCapital as one word. It was easier to trademark, and ultimately I knew people would just shorten it up to PlainsCapital anyway.

On Friday October 3, 2003, we stopped being PNB Financial and on Monday we were PlainsCapital Bank.

Q: Those steps eventually led to the rollout of PlainsCapital's first brand awareness campaign "No Fences"?

The "No Fences" campaign started at the very end of 2003. This is where the third agency, Hybrid, came in to play because I knew they were expert at wesite and collateral design.

We really wanted to play off of our West Texas heritage and the plains there, because of the values people associate with that straightforward way of doing business. They took the logo and based on the buffalo--the open plains--and our branding position that we'll do whatever it takes, and the idea of "No Fences" was born. It was a concept that was simple and understandable.

We then dropped the old Internet site and created a corporate site with all the subsidiary parts rolled up under the same heading.

Q: How do you rate the awareness campaign's success?

We don't have formal metrics right now, because our research function is in its infancy. I do know that the company has continued to grow at an incredible rate, but I don't know how much to attribute that to the branding effort.

It has upgraded the bank's image in Lubbock, but it has not increased business--because they knew us already. Our real growth is in the larger markets. But in a market as big as Dallas, it's hard to have metrics because its so relationship based. We'd have to do unbelievable amounts of advertising to get name recognition in these markets and that's not in our business model. But it has given the lenders new tools to work with and something to talk about to customers. They feel they're giving a professional presentation because everything they now have carries out the brand.

Q: Any new initiatives?

Yes, No Fences Inside. This is an internal branding follow through that I think any company should execute that does an external branding effort. You need to make sure that whatever is going on inside the company and how your customers are being treated is reflecting that brand.

We did some road shows on the initial rollout and made a concentrated effort to let employees know what was happening with the branding initiative, but now we're going back to make sure they understand it's part of the corporate culture.

We're also about to come out with new looks concentrating on clever uses of the buffalo. There's a lot of life in it, and it should be some time before we run out of ways to interpret it.

Q: What do you see as the biggest challenge for a bank of your size?

Because we are primarily a commercial bank, our biggest challenge is generating core deposits.

We're unique, because the bank started in West Texas and was mainly located there until about five years ago. That bank started as commercial but became retail because it grew so quickly. Because of that, we have a good opportunity to generate deposits in West Texas. But in the other markets, Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio and Austin, we are strictly a commercial and a private bank, so consequently deposits are always an issue.

We don't have the convenience factor that larger banks do with branches on every corner, so we need to generate deposits in other ways. We've used certificates of deposit successfully over the past few years. They may not always be considered a core deposit by industry standards, but for our purposes, if it's less than $1,000, we consider that to be core deposit.

We've also used money market promotions. The latest industry news I've seen is that you can keep a money market customer for an average of seven years, so we've put that in the core deposit category.

Of course, we have a big effort to get commercial customers to deposit their money with us, and that's been quite successful in all our markets. But to compete for retail deposits--except on a limited basis, where every big bank out there is offering large sums of money in order to get core deposits--we have just chosen not to get in the middle of that. It doesn't pay for us.

Carol A. Towne, executive vice president and director of marketing, Plains Capital Corp.

PlainsCapital Bank[SM]

Profile: PlainsCapital Bank, Dallas Texas

Established: 1987 in Lubbock, Texas

Assets: $2.5 billion

PlainsCapital Companies:

PlainsCapital Ban

PlainsCapital Leasing

PlainsCapital Wealth Management, A Trust Company

PlainsCapital Securities

PlainsCapital McAfee Mortgage

Primelending--A PlainsCapital Company

MomentumFunding--PlainsCapital Company

Hester Capital Management

Capital Title

Assurance 1031 Exchange

RELATED ARTICLE: A round-up of the PlainsCapital brand.

What's a brand?

A brand is a promise. Our brand tells our customers what they can expect from us.

What does PlainsCapital promise its customers?

To people seeking a trustworthy financial relationship, PlainsCapital is the diversified financial services company that delivers a responsive, personalized approach to meeting their needs.

In short--we promise (and deliver) financial services without the obstacles.

How does the tagline No Fences communicate this promise?

No Fences unites all of PlainsCapital Corporation's subsidiaries and their diverse products and services under one common theme. As far as our customers are concerned, we have multiple companies, but when they work with just one of those companies, they have access to all the services we offer.

No Fences describes our western roots and our entrepreneurial spirit.

No Fences describes our straightforward one-stop shop, highly-personalized approach to providing financial services.

What does No Fences mean to employees?

No Fences is the guiding principle behind everything employees do at PlainsCapital. In fact, PlainsCapital employees are Fence Cutters. We remove the obstacles that prevent customers from getting the financial services they need and the personal attention they deserve.

How do we deliver financial services without the obstacles?

We live the brand. No Fences is a way of life at PlainsCapital.

Why is living the brand so important?

There's not much difference between our banking products and services and those of our competitors. It's how we deliver those products and services that make us memorable. It's the high-touch personal service that makes our customers tell their friends about us. As employees, branding impacts our goals, attitudes, performance, relationships and processes.

(Reprinted with permission from the PlainsCapital Corp.)

Janet Bigham Bernstel specializes in writing about marketing and financial services industry issues. She works in Jupiter, Fla.