They changed their business by changing their brands.

Brand personality development for a popular integrated growth marketing platform.

Motus began its life as an effective but narrowly pointed mileage tracking and reporting app. With the rise of hybrid and remote workforces, the company’s action-oriented CEO saw an opportunity to extend into new classes of “mixed assets”—those used by workers for both personal and business purposes, whom we subsequently defined as the Anywhere Workforce.

We worked with Motus, first, to position its original offering as the most responsive and valuable way to manage mobility services. At the same time, we built an updated platform and messaging for launch a few years into the future, when the company had built out its full platform. Speaking now to remote workers as much as corporate managers, we created targeted messaging for the new community of “Arrivers,” as we called them.

At the same time, we also took hold of the company’s decidedly organic product naming system and rationalized it so that its various offerings felt strategically unified—and unmistakable Motus’s own.

Within one year of our effort, Motus was able to bolster its customer base by nearly 10% and achieve a 94% customer retention rate by widening its reimbursement scope to include mobile devices and remote work with three new offerings: Remote Work Reimbursement, Motus Device, and Arriver Services.

Working with the leadership of REVI Media, a NYC-based social media marketing agency, we developed the brand foundation and identity for PX in a new marketing category, Predictive Customer Acquisition.

Silverpop, an Atlanta-based provider of sophisticated email and marketing solutions, realized it needed to tell a more compelling and differentiated story. Doing so would enable the company not only to compete more effectively in an intensely crowded space but also to position itself for an eventual IPO or acquisition. The story accomplished precisely that, supporting Silverpop’s acquisition by IBM some two years later.

For all its strengths and residential and business appeal, the City of Dearborn simply wasn’t telling its story. As a result, civic and business leaders concluded the city was missing out on opportunities to attract business and next-gen talent. Home to the nation’s largest Arab American population, a dynamic component of the city’s distinctive culture and business community, Dearborn also needed a more effective story for shaping positive perceptions in the national media.

Noted for its ability to engage with diverse constituencies through a process characterized by accountability, transparency and inclusiveness, Applied Storytelling led a discovery process that involved online and in-person surveys in both English and Arabic with over 1,900 respondents as well as a half-day strategic visioning session involving a cross section of residents and community leaders.

Following public and civic input, the new brand was adopted shortly before the advent of COVID-19. Branded civic programs and initiatives began in earnest in mid-2021, followed by the development of a new visitor web site, the city’s first ever, in late 2022.

For a new company looking to enhance the candidate experience and yield better hiring and recruiting outcomes beginning with an innovative mobile app, we developed the messaging and story to build awareness and interest at launch. From there, we adapted messaging to web copy as well as a pitch deck to recruiters, and worked with the company to develop its initial communications plan.

Shure, a highly respected audio brand best known for its iconic microphones, recognized the tremendous market opportunity represented by the explosion of personal audio—an opportunity that other established and new brands alike were quick to exploit. At the same time, the company harbored genuine concern about losing credibility with its core audience of audio pros. Drawing on audience research, internal stakeholder interviews, competitive insight and a deep dive into Shure’s own communications and products, we showed Shure the way forward: to establish a distinct prosumer flavor of the brand that leveraged Shure’s ability to bring moments to life through its live performance credibility. We also showed how the Chicagoland-based brand could draw on the legends and lore of its American roots. The tagline we developed sums it up: Legendary performance™. Consumers caught on and pros continued to feel the love. Today, nearly two decades since we helped establish this consumer brand beachhead, Shure is the well-reviewed and well-established consumer audio brand it set out to become.

Eric: Taylor Guitars is one of the few clients where our contribution centered mostly on content and copy, not communications strategy. Led by founders Bob Taylor and Kurt Lustig, the Taylor Guitars brand had one of the clearest “native senses of itself” of any brand we’ve encountered. For a period of several years in the mid-2000s, as the copywriter on the MiresBall creative team, I developed content for Taylor’s lavish catalogs and wrote copy for its new product launches and promotions, including Taylor’s introduction of its all-electric SolidBody series in 2007.

Cybersecurity professionals have no shortage of conferences and events to attend. So why should they create space on their calendars for a new one offered by Google? That was what Applied Storytelling was engaged to figure out. Working with leaders from Google’s recently acquired Mandiant subsidiary, we articulated a clear purpose and vision for its year-old mWISE conference and then brought that vision to life in an eye-opening way.

With a deep dive into the competitive landscape supplemented by interviews both with conference organizers and previous year’s attendees, we identified an opportunity for mWISE to leverage its strength as a conference by and for practitioners providing the freshest threat-fighting insights from the companies and practitioners on the frontlines of business. We paired this key idea with a distinctive vibe inspired by a quote from Mandiant founder and CEO Kevin Mandia: “We’re like the Navy SEALs of cybersecurity.”

The first of next year’s conference communications are just now rolling out. With the brand foundation, distinctive creative and communications planning we have in place, we are confident we will meet and exceed Google’s ambitious attendance targets.

The Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago is a cornerstone of leadership formation for the Lutheran Church. The school’s Impact Fund is central to sustaining its educational mission. At a time of rising costs and a decline in denominational funding, we worked with the school to strategize a new donor engagement plan. With the plan in place, we then worked with leadership to develop new cornerstone communications, including a case statement and impact brochure.

At the time of our engagement, WebMD Health Services, one of WebMD’s three core businesses, was the national leader in providing wellbeing programs to corporations and health plans. Despite this, the company’s market leadership began to be challenged by point solutions that targeted various pieces of WebMD’s comprehensive portfolio of offerings. Along with this challenge to its business, WebMD Health Services, a pioneer in the space, began to be perceived—and positioned by its competitors—as yesterday’s business.

The company, which had never formally positioned its offering, now saw the need to do so. Applied Storytelling worked closely with leadership to isolate and then articulate the decisive strength and value the brand possessed—beyond the completeness of its offering.

Equipped with this core insight, WebMD then proceeded to develop a more complete visual and messaging toolset for reclaiming its leadership position. The company’s internal team and external consultants used the toolset AS developed to reimagine every touchpoint of the brand.

WebMD Health Services regained momentum and retained its leadership in the wellness management space despite continued intensifying competition. Two years after our initial engagement, WebMD Health Services re-engaged us to develop the narrative and messaging toolset for its new platform offering, WebMD ONE. With the launch of this offering, WebMD Health Services was positioned to reassert its leadership and validate its claims as an industry innovator even more powerfully.