RBC Introduces Self to Centura’s Base with Ads and Phone Calls

Five months after becoming Royal Bank of Canada’s first U.S. retail banking acquisition, RBC Centura Banks Inc. this week commenced its largest advertising campaign ever, one that emphasizes high-touch service and — to some degree — highlights its new ownership.

As part of its post-merger campaign, RBC Centura has been making an extra effort to hold on to and strengthen relationships with its 650,000 retail customers. Loan officers and branch employees have been ordered to analyze accounts and get directly in touch with those in higher asset-size brackets who qualify for low- or no-fee accounts.

Bank employees have been phoning clients by the thousands, a practice noted in one of the campaign’s TV ads. Speaking over a slide show of family snapshots, a narrator says: “You may find it hard to believe that a bank would call its customers and recommend a checking account that could actually save them money. So did the 30,000 customers we called last month.”

The ad campaign is to run in major markets such as Raleigh and Charlotte in North Carolina, and Norfolk, Va., as well as in smaller cities and towns from Wilmington, N.C., and New Bern, N.C., to Florence and Myrtle Beach, in South Carolina. Christopher Marinac, an analyst at SunTrust Robinson-Humphrey in Atlanta, said, “I think they want to establish themselves as another bank alternative in the Carolinas.”

Though the yearlong ad campaign for RBC Centura is running only in Centura’s existing markets in the Carolinas and Virginia, it could help the Canadian company build brand awareness as it contemplates more U.S. acquisitions. Executives in Toronto have said they would like to add to their U.S. retail banking franchise in the next couple of years, especially in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.

The television and print effort prominently features the Toronto parent’s formal name — RBC Financial Group — but makes no explicit reference to the fact that the new ownership at the former Centura Banks Inc., of Rocky Mount, N.C. is a Canadian company.

Up to this point, the fact that it is not U.S.-based has not hurt it in terms of customer relationships, something Terry Earley, RBC Centura’s director of marketing, attributes to the fact that the bank’s new Canadian parent has made few, if any, changes.

“Anecdotally, we just have not had any feeback to the effect that it’s an issue,” Mr. Earley said. The company has not conducted any research to gauge customer opinions about the merger with a Canadian bank. “Quantitatively, we haven’t done anything like that.”

RBC Financial Group, which has assets of $200 billion, has been on a buying spree south of the Canadian border for two years. In addition to $12 billion-asset Centura, which it bought for $2.3 billion in stock, it has acquired companies involved in insurance, wealth management, brokerage, and investment banking.

The television commercials are the first since 1994 for RBC Centura. Mr. Earley said TV “is the right channel to communicate the message that we’re trying to get out there to the customers and contacts in the market.”

The budget for the campaign, by the Buntin Group of Nashville, was not disclosed but Mr. Earley charicterized it as “the most significant thing we’ve ever done.”

The trio of half-minute TV spots and the print ads show snapshots of children, weddings, birthdays, and other slice-of-life situations, and carry the tagline “Building a better bank, one customer at a time.”

RBC Centura hopes that by emphasizing service and “personalized banking,” it can capitalize on the industry’s ongoing consolidation in the Southeast, such as the Sept. 1 merger of Wachovia Corp. and First Union Corp. as Wachovia, which has made Charlotte its home. And RBC Centura’s campaign kicks off as Bank of America Corp., also headquartered in Charlotte, is trying to reinvent itself as a more customer-friendly company after years of acquisitions.

He noted that the campaign targets prospects and customers alike. The former could be people now banking at Southeast competitors such as Wachovia, Bank of America Corp., and BB&T Corp. of Winston-Salem, N.C., which has also been a major player in the industry’s contraction in the Southeast.

Centura, itself the product of a decade of mergers in the Carolinas and Virginia, is one of a portfolio of U.S. companies RBC Financial Group has acquired the last two years. It bought Liberty Life Insurance and Liberty Insurance Services of Greenville, S.C., last November; the Minneapolis brokerage Dain Rauscher in January; and completed its purchase of the Boston brokerage Tucker Anthony Sutro on Nov. 1.

The Toronto company has begun consolidating and rebranding all its U.S. acquisitions under the RBC Financial Group name.

Said Mr. Earley: “It was time to come out with a campaign that … while holding onto the roots and the values of the past at Centura, would start building the linkage with our parent.”