Project Description

Giving Hawaii’s most community-rooted bank a brand identity equal to its founding story — in a market where mainland banks were buying scale and locals were losing ground.

Brand Context

Central Pacific Bank was born from an act of resistance. In 1953, a group of Japanese American veterans of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and the 100th Infantry Battalion — men who had fought for a country that had interned their families — sat under the trees at Ala Moana Beach Park sharing plate lunches, and planned a bank. Not because they saw a market opportunity. Because they had been denied access to one.

When CPB opened its doors in downtown Honolulu on February 15, 1954, it became the first new bank to open in Hawaii since 1935. Its founders weren’t looking to build wealth for shareholders. They were building access for people the financial establishment had deliberately ignored.

Sixty-six years later, CPB remained one of Hawaii’s most trusted community institutions — a 30-branch network, deeply embedded in island life, with a track record of service that no mainland bank could replicate. But the brand didn’t look the part. The visual identity had drifted. The story — one of the most resonant founding narratives in American banking — was buried in history pages no one read. And under the leadership of Chairman and CEO Paul Yonamine and President Catherine Ngo, the bank was entering a period of digital transformation. It needed a brand strong enough to carry both its past and its future.

The Challenge

How do you modernize a beloved institution without erasing the soul that made people love it in the first place?

CPB faced a dual pressure: mainland-owned competitors were arriving with tech-forward experiences and national resources, while younger Hawaii residents expected the same digital convenience from local banks that they got from national ones. A rebrand that leaned only modern would sacrifice heritage. A rebrand that leaned only heritage would sacrifice relevance. The answer had to hold both.

Strategic Insight

CPB’s real competitive advantage was never its products — it was its provenance. No mainland bank can be founded by people who fought for Hawaii. That origin is the brand.

The reframe was this: CPB doesn’t serve a community. It is the community — built by it, for it, from it. In a banking landscape full of scale and efficiency, CPB’s differentiator was humanity with history. The brand work needed to make that visible, legible, and unmistakably local — in a way that premium national players could never authentically claim.

Creative Execution

We led a full brand identity project — from strategic foundation to visual rollout:

  • Brand Strategy: We anchored the brand around CPB’s irreplicable founding story — the “Go for Broke” spirit translated from the battlefield into banking. The positioning framed CPB not as a Hawaiian bank, but as the bank of Hawaii’s people: built to serve everyone the establishment overlooked, as relevant today as it was in 1954.

  • Visual Identity: The new identity drew directly from CPB’s roots in mid-century Hawaii — warm, optimistic, human. The logotype received a modern update while retaining its original character. A bespoke illustration system — built around Hawaii’s ocean, flora, and fauna — brought the brand’s values to life without resorting to generic island imagery. Every element was designed to feel local in a way that couldn’t be faked.

  • Brand Architecture and Messaging: We developed a messaging platform that connected CPB’s historical mission — access and inclusion — to its present-day role in Hawaii’s economy. The brand voice shifted from institutional formality to genuine warmth: the kind of directness you’d expect from a neighbor, not a bank.

  • Flagship HQ Experience: The rebrand extended to CPB’s flagship headquarters in downtown Honolulu — a physical expression of the new brand language that made the bank’s story tangible at the point of highest customer interaction.

  • Internal Launch: Brand adoption required internal alignment first. We developed rollout materials to bring CPB’s 850+ employees inside the story — ensuring that the people representing the brand understood not just what it looked like, but why it existed.

Results

  • Full brand rebrand launched in 2020 across all customer touchpoints — visual identity, messaging, digital, branch environment

  • Brand positioned CPB as the community-native alternative in a market increasingly dominated by mainland competitors

  • New identity gave CPB’s digital transformation — including the development of a banking-as-a-service initiative — a modern, credible brand foundation

  • CPB went on to post record earnings in 2021, ending the year with approximately $7.4 billion in assets and 30 branches across Hawaii

  • Brand heritage strengthened community trust during COVID-19 response: CPB originated more PPP loans than any other lender in Hawaii — 36.5% of all state PPP loans, more than all other major Hawaii banks combined

Reflection

This was a reminder that the most powerful brand stories are the ones that are already true — they just need to be told at the right scale. CPB didn’t need a new identity invented from nothing. It needed its own story handed back to it with the craft and confidence it deserved. In a category that often reduces community banking to a niche, this work proved that heritage is a competitive advantage — if you’re brave enough to lead with it.

Final Tagline

Banking on Hawaii’s People. Since 1954.

Role: Brand Strategy · Phenomenon · 2020

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