Have You Outgrown Your Brand?

When Jump Company was founded, we focused primarily on brand development. Over the last 25 years we have developed hundreds of logo identities and helped countless clients develop brand strategies and awareness campaigns. While our agency has an expansive track record helping brands succeed, we’re no longer just a brand shop.

As marketing dramatically shifted over the years so did our clients’ needs, which is why our agency evolved to add media planning, performance marketing, research, video production, brand experience development and more to our list of services.

Our market changed, our target audiences’ needs and mindsets changed, and so did our ability to deliver and add value. We outgrew our original brand, and hence our brand strategy needed to evolve.

Ironically, many clients approach us for help with the exact same thing. They have outgrown who they were, they need to evolve to stay relevant, they need to grow to survive or, quite simply, things just changed. Many of them are wondering where to go from here.

While our services have expanded, Jump will always be passionate about helping clients navigate through successful brand evolutions. Here are some key steps to our brand development process:

Audit and discovery. We conduct research to understand where you have been and where you’re going. To determine who is within the competitive set, we consider the market dynamics, how the brand is perceived today and what opportunities exist moving forward. Often, research includes stakeholder interviews, consumer interviews/focus groups/surveys, brand workshops and general market research.

Reporting and insights. Synthesizing our research, we report out findings along with key takeaways and insights that will drive future brand strategy, planning and messaging. While the research fuels the brand strategy, it also often helps clients identify additional opportunities for their organization and align to their business needs.

Brand strategy development. What is your brand opportunity and aspiration? Who do you exist for? What do you offer that no one else can? What attributes and reasons to believe make your brand compelling, relevant and unique? These are all critical considerations for building a successful brand strategy.

Experience guidelines. Brands are no longer just what we say they are; they’re also what they do and how consumers experience them across each and every touchpoint. To ensure your brand strategy goes beyond just words on paper, we build out guidelines with examples of how your promise and personality should come to life across messaging/tone, look/feel, user experience of the website, and customer experience across interaction with staff, services and more.

Identity exploration and change. Sometimes the evolution of your brand requires a shift in identity. This could be a modernization of your current mark, a shift to reflect the addition of other products/services/sub-brands or a complete overhaul to signal change. Jump’s process starts with an identity brief fueled by insights and the new brand strategy. From there, we lead our clients through a collaborative process to find the best identity approach that signals where they are going without losing who they have been.

If you’re contemplating what’s next for your brand, give us a shout. We’d be happy to review where you are today and recommend a path to position you best for the future.

Written By: Alex Reed

Published On: August 14, 2024August 20, 2024

The Missing Element to Your Recruitment Strategy

One of the biggest challenges companies face is recruiting and retaining employees. COVID-19 fundamentally changed the workforce shifting employee values and, in some cases, motivating employees to abandon their jobs for a different career path altogether. The great resignation caused employers to stretch their benefit packages to remain competitive — ultimately resulting in unsustainable overhead and layoffs. Today, trends such as “silent quitting” are emerging, which is ultimately causing a decrease in the quality of customer service and even the ability to provide some services.

There is by no means a silver bullet that will fix the dynamic challenges the workforce is facing today. But there is an essential piece to the puzzle that many organizations are missing, which is ensuring marketing has a seat at the HR table.

In 2021, one of our long-term health care clients asked us to rethink their approach to HR marketing. Like how Jump approaches most marketing problems, we took a step back, researched the market dynamics and audited the current approach. We identified where the organization stood in context with its competitors, researched what employees cared about and identified where the organization was losing candidates in the recruitment journey among other things.

As a result, we developed personas and articulated the employer value proposition, built an always-on marketing campaign to establish brand awareness and help build reputation, revamped the application process and website experience to simplify the journey, and targeted campaigns to meet candidates where they are. While none of these deliverables are necessarily revolutionary in the marketing space, they are often simple strategies that are forgotten when it comes to recruitment and retention. And when put into action have game-changing results.

We no longer live in a world where we can simply post a job on a job board and candidates come running or expect a paycheck and typical benefits to be enough to keep employees motivated and loyal. It is critical that companies stop working in silos and bring marketing and communications teams in so that best-in-class HR marketing strategies can be implemented. Here are a few examples of what your HR/Marketing teams should be bringing forward for your organization:

An employee value proposition to better employees that are the right fit for your organization and a brand promise that considers the employee experience and is something employees can believe in and rally around

Research-based personas for prospective and current employees

Journey maps of recruitment and onboarding practices to identify gaps and opportunities in the candidate experience

Website and content audit to showcase key differentiators, inspire action from applicants and ensure a seamless experience

Campaigns that leverage persona-based messaging and targeting capabilities across an omnichannel experience

Up-to-date database that helps fuel targeting opportunities

Always-on brand presence across key channels to ensure the brand is top-of-mind, engaging and helps build perceptions around the employer brand

Holistic reporting that demonstrates the ROI of recruitment marketing for the organization

If you are interested in learning more about optimizing your recruitment efforts, give us a shout. We’d love to have a seat at your HR table.

Written By: Jump Team

Published On: September 13, 2022September 5, 2024

On-premise Brand Video Is the Customer Communication Channel You Are Missing

Environmental Graphics. Digital Signage. On-premise Video. Whatever your terminology, marketers intuitively understand the digital evolution from physical point-of-sale signage and endcaps to monitors, screens and projectors inside a retail space. While the tactical use of this channel is common – timely promotion of sales, digital menus and wayfinding signage – don’t overlook the broader brand lift that on-premise video provides. Here’s a quick analysis of why you should be doing it and some considerations in how to structure your execution.

Why it makes sense

The first reason it makes sense is that hardware and technology costs have made it a much easier investment. LED screens are less expensive and operate at a higher efficiency for lower energy costs. Additionally, technology provides multiple paths for creating applications or using out-of-the-box application solutions that present polished results with the flexibility to scale and optimize. And most importantly, your competitors are doing it and your customers expect it.

Have something interesting to say

When you place on-premise video in your location you can be sure of one thing – your brand is top of mind when your customers see it and they connect whatever they see on it to your brand. Capitalize on this captive, focused audience with content that informs and entertains as well as promotes. Any positive experience customers have with their interaction reflects on and impacts their perception of your brand. Date and time, weather, local news, community interest or trivia can exist alongside promotion to encourage interaction and engagement.

Set the mood

The pace and the tone of content should be reflective of the display’s location and the customer frame of mind to be truly relevant and engaging. How long are people likely to be looking at a given display should dictate how much variety of content is included and how often that content changes. The entrance to a building and a waiting room are very different approaches. Similarly, if the content is being shown in the customer service area, your customer may be less interested in a humorous distraction than if they are standing in a checkout line, and a healthcare setting requires different sensitivities than a retail location.

Jump Company has an in-house video team that handles everything from pre-production to post-production including sound design, motion graphics and 3D animation. They were disappointed this information was shared via a blog article and not a YouTube video.