For the past six months, Brookline Savings Bank has been running a devilish print advertisement campaign targeting bank mergers that force commercial borrowers to find a different lender.
The ads feature a banker-cum-devil, complete with spiked tail and horns but clad in a business suit, gesturing the reader to a seat.
"Is the Banker from Hell in your Future?" the ad screams across the top.
Lisa Soli, marketing director of the $654 million-asset Boston-area mutual, said the campaign was prompted by area banks' dumping their commercial real estate customers in the wake of mergers.
The humorous ad has yielded generally positive comments from some customers and even competitors. Others, though, gave it more mixed reviews.
"Seeing the ad as a general consumer, the illustration and the idea hit me as too negative," said Jay M. Burke, a Boston marketing agent. "But I think it hits a nerve in a positive way" for small businessmen.
*
Savings Bank of Rockville, Conn., and Bank of Boston are at odds over who was first to be "First Community Bank Corp."
In 1990, Savings Bank reserved that name with the Connecticut secretary of state's office, planning to use it for a holding company in the future.
But in 1992 Bank of Boston began to use the name for its urban banking division. A year later the Boston bank registered it as a service mark.
Savings Bank offered to relinquish its interest in the name if Bank of Boston donated $50,000 for a housing fund in Rockville and Vernon, Conn., where the two banks compete.
Bank of Boston president R. Nelson Griebel sent a letter to Saving Bank's chief executive, William McGurk, offering $2,000 for the name but declining any involvement in the housing fund . Mr. McGurk said of the letter, "Frankly, the way Mr. Griebel phrased it was rather insulting."
So Mr. McGurk sent Bank of Boston a check with a counteroffer - to buy the name for $2,000. The offer was rejected, and that's where the matter stands.
A Bank of Boston spokesman declined to comment.
- Sarah Yavorsky
