In my previous post, I had a chance to blog about Doral Bank’s efforts to give back to it’s community in Puerto Rico by offering free mammograms for those who can’t afford it through Ruta Pink, inviting the community to socialize and engage in both the arts and cultural activities at the Puerto Rico Museum of Art through their Domingos dMuseo program, and encouraging the community to understand the importance of the environment through urban reforestation at their D-Parques Initiative. Doral Bank made great efforts to gain the community’s trust and in doing so managed to build a more trusting relationship with their customers as well. Afterwards, I had a great opportunity to do a phone interview with Doral Bank’s Vice President of Public Relations, Lucienne Gigante and Vice President of Brand Development and Marketing, Karla Gual to tell me more of their successful programs to identify Doral Bank not only as a financial institution but also a part of the Puerto Rican community.

In 2006, Doral Bank started out as a mortgage institution on the brink of bankruptcy. Under its new president and CEO, Glen Wakemen, Doral began to transform itself from a mortgage-based company to a full-service bank. “His vision was to create a new Doral” said Lucienne, “where the community comes first and under his leadership his vision became a true success.” With the banks here in the United States becoming more and more distrustful, perhaps they should study Doral Bank’s marketing and branding campaigns and see that to rebuild trust with the customers, you have to truly engage them and build a relationship, and what better way then to spend time within the community. “At Doral we practice what we preach. The energy and passion is there and we really go to the extra mile to contribute to the success of the communities we serve,” said Karla in an interview with Caribbean Business.

Lucienne Gigante took part in these events and she saw a definite and positive feedback. One event is the Domingos dMuseo last year which drew in a crowd of 500 people and over 60 artists. “To see the difference, many families had a great time,” said Lucienne. “They actually thanked us for organizing this event. We wanted to provide free cultural activities and have our community be involved in a whole new world to explore art education, art to our children and just have a good time.”

Being a graduate student whose focused on marketing, particularly towards the Hispanic market, I wanted to get a better idea of how a professional marketer begins a campaign and successfully communicates it to their selected target market so I asked Lucienne what was behind the success of the Ruta Pink campaign. “Having an advertising background is absolutely useful because you are trying to send a loud and clear message to your target market,” she said. “We understood that women play an important role within the family nucleus and they put their family above themselves. This was evaluated through psychographic research. With Ruta Pink, we made them distinct and encouraged them to take care of themselves.” Through a balance of traditional marketing, online marketing with the development of a very detailed and attractive website and thorough research, Ruta Pink and Doral successfully managed to promote breast cancer awareness and educate women and men of the importance of early detection just by engaging the community.

How successful was this new brand marketing? On my next post, I’ll provide a more detailed analysis in a executive summary provided by Termeh Mazhari of AMP3 Public Relations. Here is a more concise branding campaign established by Doral Bank on Brandweek.

Lucienne Gigante, VP of Public Relations

Karla Gual, VP of Brand Development and Marketing

Successful Branding Part 1: Doral Bank of Puerto Rico engages its customers

Successful Branding Part 3: Doral Bank’s new campaign was a success!