Rerelease: Unleashing growth with the 'yes, and' strategy with PNC Bank CMO, Jenn Garbach

Hey there, it's Alan. Quick note before we start. Today's episode is a rerelease from our archives. Originally aired March 2025.

We’re resharing for anyone who may have missed it the first time, because it's a great discussion on brand modernization and building marketing as a true growth engine. You may hear a few references that place it in 2025, but the insights really hold up. All right, let's get into it. Are you ready to go beyond the basics of marketing?

I'm Alan Hart and this is marketing beyond what we talk about the questions that spark change and share ideas that challenge the status quo. Join us as we explore the future of marketing and its endless potential. Today I've got Jenn Garbach, the chief marketing officer for PNC Bank. In this role, Jenn leads a team of approximately 200 marketing professionals focused on brand and line of business, marketing, paid and social media, direct marketing and all digital marketing strategies.

She's also helped oversee the banks relationship with Arnold Worldwide, PNC’s integrated marketing and advertising agency of record. Over the past 20 years, Jen has worked extensively in the financial services and professional services industries, spanning marketing, product management, strategy, technology, and customer experience. Prior to joining PNC in June of 2023, she served in leadership roles across PayPal, Capital One, and Thomson Reuters. Jenn began her career at Deloitte Consulting.

I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Jenn Garbach. Well, Jenn, 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. Yes.

I mean, we've all got to start somewhere. Tell me about your first job. Yeah, my first job was, you wore one of those bright yellow vests that said “Helping Hands”. And I was a cart pusher for Wegmans.

So for 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, the summers in high school where I’d push carts, empty trash, help customers get their groceries into their the trunks of their car, and eventually work my way up to being a cashier before I worked in the bakery. So, you know, humble beginings. I never got to be a cashier. I did the bagging groceries and 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'm a little bit judgy in line of where the precision of scanning lining up barcodes do 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. Yeah. Yeah - 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 was your path?

You're now the CMO at PNC Bank. But, like, where do 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 shant 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 client's businesses and start to unpack what's the big problem?

What's the big challenge? So I spent four years with Deloitte across health care, financial services, traveling all over. And like any good consultant, got sick of planes, trains and automobiles and went back to business school. So 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. We needed to rotate across so many different parts of 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 and 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 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 their card business supporting supporting small business card, brand and acquisition marketing, market card business where you got the venture Silver, Quicksilver behemoths And at the time we were launching venture X and that's really where I unpacked and found my love of leading large scale transformation efforts.

So it was both really starting to dial into, you know, Capital One is a behemoth in hard marketing and a very brand and marketing forward organization. So honed a lot of those skills, but also really found the passion for being part of leading those large, transformative efforts. And, you know, at the end of the decade, I 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, you know, a bit of a oh, I did a little bit of a zig zag journey, kind of accumulating a bunch of general management and marketing experiences, but all in that vein of leading transformations from/too of what's possible. And, and that's really been been the journey here at PNC. and been a fantastic part.

I could not been happier of landed where I am. A lot of times where 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.

It 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 the most, the 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, you know, a 160 year old organization, if I got my history right, what's involved in launching a new brand like how did how do you get started? It's it's, a lot of stakeholders, I would imagine so.

Yeah. It's, it's 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, like, first, it started with an organizational recognition that we need to do something different.

Like 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 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.

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, you know, 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 you know, my learning about how we talk about who we are as an organization and sort of some of the early insights that then led to, you know, our new positioning, our new, “Brilliantly Boring” branding.

But yeah, it's been it was 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 and kind of like the self-deprecating way is, is one kind of funny for a bank, but two, like, where did that where did that come from?

Yeah, “Brilliantly Boring since 1865”. Well, yeah, it started with one knowing that in a, in a world where we're up against really big incumbent banks who are significantly larger than us, we’re outspent, we don't 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 to spend to compete in that same way from a marketing standpoint. So how do we thread the needle, go right in the middle and say like our tactic to 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, you know, 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, our clients in the truest form. And then there's this dialog that would emerge around being true to to ourselves of our conservative risk profile, how we manage the business. And often times people would end the interview with this little kind of 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 you know, 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. And 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 unknowable, unique space.

And so that was the genesis of “Brilliantly Boring since 1865”. You know, we are a bank that has been around for 160 years. We are steady, we are reliable, and we're proud to wear that “boring” as a badge of honor and help tell everyone what that's going to enable for them when they, you know, when they come engage with us. Yeah, I think I even saw some, some situations where executives were walking around at the launch with, like, Chief Boring Officer tags on their...

That's right. We've got really 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 tchotchke and, 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 they're all these components of what we do that lead 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 the either brilliant experiences for our customers and clients, up for the things that they want to do so brilliantly in their lives, in 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 in a launching a boring brand. But it's then 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, 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 what 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 it is, where does marketing need to go now? At PNC?

Yeah. The, it's truly like the tip of the iceberg analogy is the most appropriate one to we packaged up this beautiful platform, and narrative that we can go forward with, and then it's building that whole ecosystem underneath of you know, 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 in the products, services, experiences that we're bringing to market. So there's more to be done as we continue to elevate and and create, when I call it the tentacles of the brand internally and then within the marketing engine itself, you can 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 repositioned marketing as an investment for growth, marketing as an engine to drive business outcomes. So we're looking heavily at, you know, the internal capabilities, the process, the data, all of our measurement infrastructure to make sure that we are, you know, 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 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 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 it's a very fun kind of leadership challenge.

And the team has been fantastic, really rising to the occasion as we undertake this. It's a lot of, a lot of work. I mean, all the things that you're talking about, the process, the, you know, the engines that you're trying to build. I, the thing that I do love about talking to you about marketing is that marketing is a big M, meaning it is actually driving growth.

It's not just the pretty pictures and the the wallpaper if you. That's right. 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 the other folks like, how do you think about people and how do they become a great change agent for an organization? Yeah, I mean, unsurprisingly for me, I think there's just a, fundamental thing that I'm motivated by, which is seeing driving big improvements and change. I get really excited about working with a team and conquering the proverbial Everest. It's 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. You know, an Everest together. So 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 it's a really proud moment when we get to take our selfie. Right? Right from the top of the summit.

There are a couple things I reflect on learning about, like how I have found success in doing that and what's kind of how it show up in the toolkit, so to speak. One of those that's really important from a marketing perspective has been really adopting more of a general managers mindset and recognizing that it can be very easy to get caught in all the jargon and the internal isms of marketing, of how the 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 .... 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.

I think one of the big pieces of that is finding that common language, like, 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, hard 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 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 or driving impact, it's what I call jazzy hand marketing. I'm just kind of waving my hands and and hoping you're going to believe the impact.

And you can only get by on that for so long for 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. Yeah, no, that makes sense. I mean, two things I might add, just about you as a person, because we work together a little bit, is your philosophy on “Yes, and...

” is a magical pivot for conversations. And then the other thing is just you're infectious, like energy. You will... it's hard not to be your friend, Jenn.

Like, I don't I don't how else to say it. Thanks, Alan! I don't know if I can work that into like a year end review retroactively, but I'd like to cite that as a proof point. Yeah.

I think, you know, I, I think that's it. It's I reflect now, I want to have fun with what I'm doing at work, 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 like the, the energy that comes in of I just I enjoy doing that and I love that you call that, “Yes, and...” It's, it's one of those improv tactics. If anyone's done improv 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 onr 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 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 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 a high impact partners.

So thanks for recognizing “Yes, and...” I love it, I love it. Well, one of the things we like to do on the show is to 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 that 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? 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 know, 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 that I'm a particularly tall woman. I think on average I'm at least like 6 to 8in 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. Yeah, learning how to navigate your way on public transportation and in taxis. And I feel like what I walked away with is, you know, I am a very high energy, high intensity person.

And I distinctly recall the kind of some moments of like, oh, this is the universe helping me teach, like teach me patience and adaptability, that it's worth looking at this through another perspective so that it's truly just one of those experiences of like, I lived in a totally different environment than what I was used to day to day, but helped me. I 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 really carried with me. I look back with like tons of of fond memories, but I think was a really core just learning experience. So I think that's that's probably the one that I think of most when you ask that. Awesome.

Or if you were starting this journey of a career in life all over again, what advice would you give your younger self? Someone summed this up for me in the, you know, 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 like take to that and a tough take to that. Like, yeah, you know, the, the great take to that is advocate for yourself. Don't like nobody else is thinking about you as much as you are.

So if you want that job, that promotion, that thing, what 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 let it roll off a little bit. 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.

So 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 and that's okay. But I think that's for the greater good.

I don't think people need to think about me that much. Yeah, I tend to 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 I'm spending a good amount of time on. And forgive me for sounding semi cliche. Yeah, 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 in conversations over AI, in 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 is actually complete lack of clarity of what that's going to look like when you know 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 to move in and start adopting some of that technology.

And I'll tell you, 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 year, 20 or 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. Like, how can we get smarter collectively? How can we get when we get ready?

Right? Yeah. And I agree with you. I mean, there is a lot of AI in the universe right now 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. There's various ways to use it. Back office, 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 going to be able to move to because of regulation, etc..

So, yeah, it's a it's a tricky one to figure out. But if you're sitting idle, that's the worst thing that you could be doing right now. Yeah. That's right.

Because the moment is just going to pass you by. Yes. And, and I think that's what I think is in its continuing to live through or lead through the ambiguity is like you just don't know when the moment is 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, the organizational readiness is there of like, let's go.

We can't just be thinking then about like how I wish we could, wish we'd been planning for this. But yeah, there's like, you can overprepare to what we're planning for the the unknown. Okay. 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 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, you know, increasingly Super Bowl ads are becoming less and less likable. And it it does a bit of a throwback to the, you know, golden era. So, so to speak of, the early 20 aughts of, you know, when there was just a lot more kind of creativity, a lot like there were more risks, and things feeling a little bit more boilerplate.

So I'm, I'm interested there to see what's going on because I think there's like a broader reflection of the macro environment we're in today where a lot of folks are like threading the needle, but take even like recent days out of that, that it's felt like a little bit of a trend. Just recently, the last couple of years 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, the data and measurement on the other side of this year.

And, and curious if we're going to hit any point of inflection in how that's showing up for like how folks are thinking about truly is that the hallmark moment for a brand? Is that the place to be showing up for who is it for? So I got I have the Super Bowl on my mind, mostly because like, I 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 and things like that. But like one time in the year where you're really looking forward to watching some ads, so and geeking out 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, but, 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? I think it's, the combination of the pace of change, data technology, privacy and also the just constant change in the regulatory privacy landscape. I think that's both opportunity and threat.

So, you know, I was going to double edged this one. Alan. I think one, you know, if you're not ready and building agility into your marketing strategy or marketing capabilities, like all of 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 the kind of like 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 I think that's the biggest challenge right now is there's just so there's so much that we have access to as marketers. There's, you know, the veritable playground of like data and insights and personalization, but also at a time where all of those same things that we want to activate on under the microscope for privacy and access and folks wanting to to throttle what they can do.

So I think that's just going to continue to be a really, you know, a needle that we have to thread. But I think building again, building for agility will be an advantage. And those who aren't I think are going to be in a world of hurt, as it's really hard to then be on the the receiving end of all of those changes if you can't build in the adaptability. Yeah, I tend to agree with you.

Well, Jenn, thank you for coming on the show. It's been awesome. Thank you for having me. This has been fun.

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