Jamaica Tourist Board
The pandemic changed people’s attitudes and behaviors around travel, and Jamaica needed to pivot in order to inspire travelers to choose Jamaica.
Research showed leisure travelers valued the soul-feeding benefits of travel more than ever. This played to Jamaica’s strengths, so we positioned Jamaica as the destination that helps travelers return to their best selves by demonstrating how Jamaica touches you, transforms you, and restores you.
Our messaging approach was an invitation to the world to come to Jamaica—and come back to being their best selves.
Where past campaigns seemed to prioritize telling people how to think about Jamaica, we sought only to inspire the desire to go there. We eschewed postcard-like imagery in favor of sensorial cues with transportive powers, doing away with taglines in the process.
Wells Fargo
While undergoing a rebrand on the retail bank side, Wells Fargo’s Corporate & Investment Bank (CIB) sought to refresh its brand—via a reenergized value proposition supported by updated brand tenets and brand architecture encompassing its three primary business units.
In addition to an assessment of competitors’ brands and positionings and how they’re realized, I led one-on-one in-depth interviews with dozens of executive- and senior-level staff across Wells Fargo CIB, as well as among key clients. I partnered with clients through findings, implications, and ideation stages, delivering a new brand strategy that held true to the brand’s past and served to stretch the business for growth.
FINRA
Amidst the rise of new investment platforms and a growing get-rich-quick mentality among users, FINRA sought to better understand this “new investor” audience and what role FINRA might play in keeping them from getting in over their heads.
From our analysis across the fours Cs, including a national quantitative study to inform a segmentation and targeting approach, and uncovered eye-opening attitudinal and behavioral data to inform our work.
We defined the role for the brand for its first-ever mass media outreach, and developed the creative brief for the “Get Your Head In The Trade” campaign, reaching new investors across TV and digital channels to counter reckless investing behavior and the mindset that feeds it.
988
In 2022, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline was converting from a ten-digit number to 988, with all states required to implement 988 functionality by July of that year. For a state government agency I reframed this as not just a public health education program but also a brand campaign, leveraging the cultural momentum around mental health to recast the Lifeline not as a number to call only as a last resort, but as a help line for those in need.
I defined the campaign’s audience as not only those most at risk for mental health crisis, but also the support systems surrounding higher risk populations and even the general public—recognizing that those who don’t need 988 today may need it in the future.
I also developed a communications channel plan that identified campaign audiences—spanning from those most at risk to the general public—with campaign objectives for each audience, along with mindsets, key messages, and channel considerations.
Amtrak
As Amtrak was looking for a fresh new campaign and story to tell—along with a refreshed brand strategy—we saw an opportunity to position Amtrak as the antidote to the unpleasantness of air and car travel.
Travelers have numbed themselves to the pains of flying and driving, believing they have no other options. Our strategy was to awaken travelers to the hassles they’ve been putting up with positioning Amtrak as the solution. Break The Travel Quo depicts how Amtrak frees you from the crap you put up with when you fly or drive.
We conceded that there are travel distances where Amtrak doesn’t make the most sense. But for trips between 100 and 400 miles, Amtrak has a solid claim as the best travel option. We targeted travelers in the eastern corridor, Amtrak’s core service region, for whom this claim had real power. And the savvy, clever tone served to modernize the drab brand.
General Mills’ Box Tops for Education
After General Mills transitioned the Box Tops for Education brand into an online-only experience, early results were less than promising. As part of a larger initiative to develop the new user experience, my team and I were brought in to assess and recommend new communications protocols.
To start, I re-crafted the audience segmentation, changing the way they see the participants and, thereby, how they interact with them. Further investigation uncovered a root of the participation problem: participants felt they weren’t getting much in return for what was being asked of them—and current communications were likely contributing to the problem.
New targeting and a communications framework for all audiences, including objectives for communications and key messages, informed a robust playbook for communications, audience journeys, a new creative look-and-feel for all branded comms—and a subsequent contract focused on internal communications to drive greater understanding and participation among General Mills brand leads.
AXA
AXA, a major European health insurance provider, was looking to launch an America-based insurance offering designed for un- and under-insured Americans. As a brand with no American footprint offering a new product to a new audience, AXA sought to create a new brand, define the brand purpose, determine the product’s final features, and develop foundational go-to-market communications elements.
In a qualitative/co-creation phase, we gathered qualitative insights direct from respondents, tested and validated brand strategies and brand names, validated the most salient product attributes, and gathered input on creative expressions and channels.
In just nine weeks we delivered a tested and validated brand strategy including brand purpose and brand house with tenets, as well as a brand name and logo and consumer-facing creative toolkit for pilot launch, inclusive of product description, messaging with story building blocks, key messages, and visual design.
The Real Cost
Just as the battle against youth smoking was being won, e-cigarettes threatened to create a whole new generation of tobacco users. By 2016, vaping had become the most common form of tobacco use among youth, raising questions about the possible dangers—but with few good answers. (Because science takes a long time.)
To inform the first ever national vaping prevention campaign in the U.S., I conducted interviews with teens to validate hypotheses, inform the creative brief, and confirm that the brand—historically focused on cigarettes—had the credibility to speak about vaping.
The “Don’t Get Hacked” campaign targeted adventurous teens who assume vaping is no big deal, especially compared to smoking, and was informed by the insight that teens lack a clear reason not to vape. But teens who vape might be inhaling nicotine, making them vulnerable to addiction. And we knew from our prior cigarette work that the notion of vulnerability had the power to get attention and sway behavior.