About a decade ago, Elizabeth B. Eckel was sitting in a marketing meeting at The Washington Trust Co. She and her co-workers were brainstorming, trying to come up with a new campaign – something that would be community oriented and help market the positive face of the bank.
At the time, Eckel was pregnant.
“And the only thing that I really had an urge for was peanut butter, that’s it,” she said recently. “So someone said, ‘Beth, you’re eating peanut butter again?’”
From there, Eckel led the conversation into the benefits of peanut butter – high in protein, etc. – and then to the food shortage at the Rhode Island Community Food Bank.
“So we said, ‘Hey, why don’t we have a peanut butter drive?’ And it took off from there,” Eckel said. That campaign, the PB Xpress, has since collected a total of 57 tons of peanut butter for the food bank. This year alone, 13 tons were collected.
And that community-oriented campaign is exactly the type of image that Eckel, in her position as senior vice president and head of the marketing department, has tried to create for the country’s oldest community bank, founded in 1800.
At Boston College, Eckel studied marketing. A high school guidance counselor was “actually helpful” in guiding her – because she liked business and art – into the field.
“He sat me down and said, ‘OK, you’re good in math, you like business and you like art,’” Eckel recalled recently. “‘There’s this new career called marketing.’”
When she was a junior in college, she interned with the marketing department at Citizens Bank. “I was just fascinated by bank marketing,” Eckel said. “You get into the advertising and into the business strategy – it was just great.”
But when she started out after her 1982 graduation – she earned a B.A. magna cum laude – it was tough to break into marketing as a career. A friend told Eckel that she would have to work in sales first before transitioning into marketing. So she started selling personal computers for Texas Instruments, working out of the Waltham, Mass., office and traveling around the region. Much of her job involved setting up demonstration booths in department stores, including Ames and Anne & Hope.
“Back then, it was these home computers that were big and bulky – and they had primarily games for kids and maybe some home-management tools,” Eckel said. “Very rudimentary.”
And, although it wasn’t her long-term career goal, Eckel fit in well on a sales team. Within a year, she was promoted to a regional manager position. “And if it wasn’t for all the travel, I probably would still be in sales,” she said recently. “I think that in both sales and marketing you have to be a people person – you have to be able to gauge what people like and think. Perceptions have a lot to do with how people make purchasing decisions.”
In 1983, a marketing position opened at Greater Providence Deposit and Trust. Eckel pounced on the job and spent four years there. Then she moved to a public relations and marketing job at Eastland Bank in Woonsocket.
During her time in Woonsocket, Eckel earned an MBA, with a concentration in marketing, from the University of Rhode Island.
The year she graduated, 1991, she moved to Westerly and took a job as the head of the advertising and public relations department at Washington Trust Co. She picked up responsibility, becoming an assistant vice president, then vice president.
During 2000, she was put in charge of Washington Trust Co.’s marketing department.
That role involves shaping public perception of the bank, physical marketing such as signs and also handling investor relations. The bank is Rhode Island’s largest publicly traded bank. Eckel handles not only the information that’s passed on to shareholders but also the information that’s given to fund managers and investment managers.
Last week, Eckel and Washington Trust Chairman and CEO John C. Warren attended a conference in New York, spending two days pitching the bank to investors from around the country. Setting up that face-to-face marketing is an important part of Eckel’s role at the bank, she said.
“It’s one thing to be reading financial statements or wire reports or news reports about someone else’s interpretation of the company,” she said. “But, particularly in this industry in these economic times, if [the CEO] looks you in the eye and says, ‘No, we’ve never had a subprime mortgage program,’ that’s important for maintaining the brand that we’ve developed.”
Since she’s been at Washington Trust, there has been an expansion push into northern Rhode Island, including Providence, that has created a challenge for Eckel: maintaining the bank’s image as a community bank, but also pushing it as progressive to draw in customers.
Eckel has also been on the forefront of planning the current campaign to draw existing and new customers into the Providence office when it relocates to Westminster Street in October. That branch will have a “high-tech feel,” she said, with laptop connections for patrons and digital signage.
To keep track of it all, like many busy professionals, she relies on her BlackBerry.
“I depend on that for everything – I’m always looking at it, checking e-mails. The good and the bad is that you’re available 24-7 … but you always want to take a peek when you should be enjoying personal time.”
Work has blended into her home life. Eckel has to regularly attend events that include walkathons, beach cleanups and concert series sponsored by the bank. Her husband and son, both named Jonathan, usually join her.
“I’m there representing the bank, but they are there having fun,” she said. •
