Branding

Bringing Brands to Life

Branding is about telling an engaging story about a company, product or person that captures and then keeps people attention by updating it as the brand evolves. It's much more than just a logo, colors or clever tagline. A brand must be brought to life by everyone who is part of the organization or company. Below are examples of branding programs to which I've contributed or led.

Cerner Brand Transformation & Refresh

Cerner was founded in 1979 as an electronic health record company just in time to capitalize on the government mandate to health systems and hospitals to move from paper records to digital. The company evolved tremendously since to impact clinical, financial and operational functions of health systems, hospitals, private practices, public health, insurers and even individual patients. Recent advances in technology such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, the cloud, data-as-a-service and more have challenged Cerner and others to innovate exponentially. That required a brand transformation and refresh. I was part of a team that developed a new enterprise value proposition (EVP). a new brand personality, voice and tone, brand architecture and brand guidelines. I'll describe the critical thinking, research, collaboration and work process behind each of these projects as well as other work I did at Cerner.

Company Kitchen Brand Transition

Treat America Food Services had been the parent company since 1987, however Company Kitchen micro markets was launched in 2011 and had a broader nationwide footprint and faster growth. I recommended the brand transition to make Company Kitchen our parent company and rename the sub-brands to CK Café, CK Market, CK Vending, CK Coffee and CK Catering to create more integration among the brands to help us cross sell our services to our more than 3,000 clients nationwide and to prospects. Below is the visual identify transformation before and after the re-branding. We are currently working on a tagline.

Before

After

Infographics

Instead of just copy to tell people about us on the Website, in presentations and in other channels, we created four info graphics about our history, our services, the way we source and prepare high-quality food and our care for the environment. It has been a novel way to talk about our brand and tell our story.

Digital and Print Collateral

Below is our latest digital/hardcopy collateral piece depicting Company Kitchen and its sub-brands after the re-branding.

A placeholder tagline is on the cover until we determine a new tagline. Click below to look inside.

Below are a large digital/hardcopy and a tri-fold brochure about Company Kitchen before the re-branding.

"More Choices. More Benefits" was our tagline reflecting more variety for our consumers and positioning the offering as an employee benefit to our B-to-B clients. Click on the brochure on the left to look inside.

Operationalizing Brands and Taglines

UMB Bank

Count on More.
We worked with UMB Bank's marketing team, its advertising and branding agencies to come up with a tagline called "Count on More," to emphasize that both retail and commercial customers could count on more services from the bank than perceived. Importantly, we operationalized the brand tagline by demonstrating the breadth of services most people didn't perceive UMB Bank could provide. The tagline was used for more than 10 years.

Marion Merrill Dow

Your Prescription for Better Business.
For Marion Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, we developed a brand tagline targeted at pharmacists to get them to engage with the company more. We operationalized the tagline by providing business counsel, continuing education curriculum and business resources to help them run their pharmacies better. Engagement increased 70% in one year.

Sprint

High Tech Hero.
Sprint's marketing team had already developed this brand position and tagline. We helped reinforce it from a PR standpoint. We used research from Cone Communications that said 70% of parents were more likely to do business with companies that helped support their children's education or health. We leveraged Sprint's NFL sponsorship to develop a program to help 100,000+ students improve their writing skills with an essay contest called
"Sprint Sportsmanship for Life."

National Football League

Play Football.
The NFL sought more engagement with youth. The "Sprint Sportsmanship for Life" program helped bring 100,000+ students closer to the NFL by getting them to think and write about sportsmanship. The students met with NFL players and the winners of the contest participated in a sportsmanship summit at a Super Bowl.