When PNC Bank popped up an orange-bricked barbershop outside the Dallas Stars’ home arena, it turned heads. Hockey fans were drawn to the giant, perfectly coifed mullet that adorned the top of the Mane St. Branch activation, made out of approximately 700 sections of synthetic ginger hair and styled with 350 bottles of hair spray. The barbershop was an homage to the sport’s “good flow” hockey hair trend and invited attendees in to rock their own mullet, thanks to a giveaway of co-branded Dallas Stars and PNC hats with hockey hair attached to them.
The hockey hair play was a first for the brand and one that took some out-of-the-box thinking, and internal convincing, to authentically bring it to life. We spoke with PNC CMO Jenn Garbach following the activation’s launch in November at American Airlines Center’s PNC Plaza to get all the details on how this campaign came together with the NHL’s Dallas Stars and what this “unboring” test-and-learn strategy means for its future experiential endeavors.
Chief Marketer: How has PNC’s partnership with the Dallas Stars evolved through the years?
Jenn Garbach: Dallas has been a priority growth market for us for quite some time, and we’ve been in partnership with the Stars for over five years now. We relaunched the PNC brand [in 2024] under our new brand platform, “Brilliantly Boring Since 1865,” and since launch, it’s put this renewed lens and opportunity for us to look at all of those existing partnerships. It started with the enthusiasm and desire to continue to grow and promote our brand, and how might we think about doing something that is big, bold and different.
[The sponsorship] has been more traditional. It’s been in “the official bank of” and “proud sponsor of,” and you see us in the in-arena signage and around. We certainly like to promote that, but this Mane St. Branch activation was truly a first for PNC of really stepping boldly into that experiential realm and doing something differently. The stars really aligned in this one.
CM: Where did the concept for this barbershop activation come from?
JG: Our physical branch footprint is not only a traditional part of the banking relationship, but it’s a core part of our growth strategy and our growth markets. We thought about different ways to manifest that [“Brilliantly Boring”] storytelling, so we came up this concept of what’s an unboring branch look like? Then, the play on words started with a main street branch that’s the quintessential bank on the main street of every town, and then this riff started with the Mane St. Branch, an ode to hockey hair and the commitment that players put into those flowing locks.
It’s ultimately a commitment to long-term growth and part of our story of being a growth-oriented challenger brand of needing to build something that is bold and distinctive in a very crowded banking marketplace. On the one hand, you can walk down the traditional road where we had our digital signage and our OOH showing the Dallas Stars players with their hockey hair, but then to go the step further of there’s something for you to experience, plus the giveaway of the hat.
We could do the traditional marketing approach, or we could take a step out of our own comfort zone … And you can imagine what that might have been like internally of trying to pitch the idea of dressing up a branch to make it look like a barbershop with hair. Something like this very easily could have been shut down early on because it sounded like such a crazy idea. That’s one of the organizational learnings for us — the willingness to continue to say “yes” to new ideas and to try them out, as we continue to rally folks and help them see the possibilities of how our brand can show up in really fun, distinctive ways.
CM: What are some other learnings the team picked up during this experiential campaign?
JG: The importance of having a great partner when you do stuff like this. I want to give kudos to the Stars. As we brought the experience into the arena, I thought what was cool was walking in and seeing the sea of white hats, which then created these visibility moments for us. One of the two games we activated that night was a nationally televised game, so that was an exciting opportunity for additional pickup.
The moments on the jumbotron, the Zamboni driver wearing a hat, the Dallas Stars Ice Girls going out wearing the — all the little components that bring it to life experientially, those were fun elements that made it feel like more than just like a flash in the moment, but something that was all the elements of pregame, during game, postgame. We’re excited and look forward to learning more.
CM: How are you measuring and analyzing the event data to leverage an activation like this in the future?
JG: We distributed over 20,000 of those hockey hair hats over the two-day event, which is insane. We had over 13 million earned social engagements. We saw a nice uptick in our site traffic, and we’re continuing to monitor and measure. We’re a very data-driven, measurement-focused marketing organization looking at, what did we get out of this?
We’ve built an entire learning and testing agenda. One of the things that was really important was going kind of full funnel of we want this to drive awareness and engagement in the market. We’d like to see if we can demonstrate that the pull through in terms of actual impact locally, in terms of clientele, is going to play out, and so building that learning agenda and socializing that internally across our team.
A big part of building that continued buy-in is being open about holding ourselves accountable to the learnings and then the real spirit of test and learn, which is here’s what we nailed and let’s replicate it and scale it, and here’s what didn’t go so well and what we’d tweak next time. We’ll be continuing to harvest all of those things internally as a team, get better and hopefully show up with some even more fun, surprising brand acts in the next year.
Photos: Courtesy of PNC Bank