Brand building in eight steps

Rural Missourians in need of transportation didn’t seem to be picking up on the transformation of OATS.

The organization started in Columbia in 1970 as the Older Adults Transportation System with three buses and four workers but quickly began transporting more than just elderly travelers. With a fleet of 650 vehicles and a staff of 700, OATS gives more than a million and a half rides a year to more than 31,000 Missourians in 87 counties.

But there was still a misconception that OATS was just for old folks, and the passenger counts were stagnating.

Three years ago, the operators of OATS decided they needed help to raise awareness of their transportation system, and they hired Word Marketing, a marketing company on South Providence Road in Columbia. The goals of the OATS campaign were to inform potential riders, donors and state legislators about the organization’s transportation services and hammer home the fact that they are available to a wide variety of residents, including those with disabilities or financial struggles.

“We talked with Word Marketing about getting the message out because there is still quite a bit of confusion in the general public’s mind about who OATS is available to,” Assistant Executive Director Dorothy Yeager said.

When OATS hired Word Marketing, the team set to work redesigning the Web site, putting out press releases regularly and placing ads with 104 radio stations, 12 TV stations and numerous print publications.

The company made the Web site (www.oatstransit.org) “more user-friendly” and put the bus schedules online, Yeager said.

The Web site’s visits have increased from 420 a week to 2,300 a week, and there has been a “noticeable awareness increase throughout Missouri” of OATS services, according to Word Marketing’s case study.

To revamp the image of OATS, Word Marketing senior partners Tony Richards and Ann Marie Quertermous and their staff started inside the organization and worked out to the public.

“A lot of people don’t understand that a company and a brand are two distinct things,” Richards said. “A company is people and process, but a brand is the experience a customer has with a company, so we target employees first to tell them what the company is trying to do.”

They created a customer-service training program, focus points for weekly meetings and regular checkpoints for managers and directors to include in e-mails.

“What they’ve helped us do is formalize our brand and make sure it’s consistent in everything we put out publicly — on the Web site and in newsletters and news releases,” Yeager said.

Word Marketing’s IDEATION strategy breaks down to eight key points: input, discovery, essential positioning, audience targeting, tactical concepting, implementation, ongoing results and next steps.

The first four steps, which usually take the team three to four months to complete, are getting to know the client, researching the company’s portion of the market, assembling a brand platform and marketing the platform internally.

“Most (marketing) companies focus just on the market, the company and the consumers; Word Marketing focuses on the inside first — board members, management team and the employees,” Richards said. “We spend several months marketing internally first.”

The last four steps integrate advertising and measuring results as the new or reconstructed brand is launched. So when a company hires Word Marketing to complete all eight steps, the process usually doesn’t have a specific endpoint.

“We’re continually measuring results — customer retention, top-line revenue, bottom-line profit,” Richards said. “We make sure we’re staying on the right track.”

When Richards and Quertermous began the company in 2005, Richards said many of the business owners he talked with didn’t understand the entire process involved in creating a company brand.

“People didn’t have a marketing process; they just had advertising,” he said.

As the company’s clientele has grown, so has the company. Richards and Quertermous started with only two employees. Now they have 12 full- and part-time workers and have clients nationwide.

The company’s offices include areas for creating video and audio ads for clients. In 2007 Word Marketing acquired Horizon Research Services, an almost 20-year-old company they use to complete the first four steps of their marketing strategy. They also have their own regularly updated blog, Web site, Twitter and Facebook page.

“You can’t just do mass media anymore,” Richards said.