The One Where I Moonlit as a Strategist for an Integrated Branding Campaign
The Client
Harlem Mothers SAVE: Stop Another Violent End is a non-profit committed to mitigating gun violence in Harlem through education, activism, and victim services. But they suffered from a lack of consistent branding and messaging.
Our Challenge
Create a new brand identity and integrated marketing campaign to reintroduce the organization to the community.
Our Agency Approach
The team I worked with on this rebranding campaign was called the TMRW Agency.
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Our Agency goal was to distill all the big thoughts and noise into a simple communications objective to build brand longevity into TMRW.
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It was very important to us that TMRW be as present as possible, to really understand and align ourselves with our client's objectives, assess their weakness, and deliver solutions.
THE ORGANIZATION DIDN'T KNOW WHO THEY WERE. NEITHER DID THEIR COMMUNITY.
The Rebrand
Throughout our visits to the organization and their community events, we notice that their branding and perceptions didn't align. Were they Harlem Mothers? Or Harlem Mothers & Fathers? They didn't know, and that was confusing for the community.
So we set out to create a recognizable, distinctive, but unified brand identity that is reflective of the organization's power as a community haven.
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The new branding was connective and representative of the actual community of people who have been affected by gun violence, all coming together to help stop it.
THEN IT WAS TIME TO REINTRODUCE THE BRAND, BUT WE GOT STUCK IN A STRATEGY SWIRL.
The Solve: I adapted, put on my strategy hat and worked with our strategist to align all of our ideas and opportunities.
I became a sounding board to help break down the research and define the narrative we wanted to tell.
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In the end, we had too many drafts of our strategy to keep count (I mean look at them!),
but through working together, we were able to settle on a clear and accurate positioning and strategy for our creative team to start executing a communications campaign.
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Here's what we came up with:
CREATIVE CAMPAIGN
Our creative campaign, called "The Language of Grief" visually represented the different forms grief can manifest, and showed how our Harlem Mothers & Fathers SAVE was best suited to teach that language, because their experience made them fluent in it.
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We wanted to create a recognizable, distinctive brand that galvanizes the neighborhood to reimagine the status quo with transformative stories of joy, resilience, and hope.
Now that we're back on track...
I had to make sure what we said aligned with what the client would understand so that we could position our work as the best option for them.
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How do we tell the story of our campaign to a client that doesn't speak marketing?
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So we crafted our narrative in a 1-2-3 structure of "Yesterday, Today, & TMRW," which allowed us to cover the situational analysis, research, strategy and our creative campaign in a linear format that our client could understand, but was also refelctive of our unique agency approach.
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We delivered.
In the end, we were able to deliver a communications campaign to a client that:
Aligned with their unique value as an organization,
Adapted to highlight their opportunity to cement their organization in the community, and
Delivered on their ultimate goal to spread a message of hope, resilience, and empowerment.
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And won the business!
