ABOUT

SETTING THE SCENE

Attracting new, younger customers to a loyal ‘Boomer’ base, and evolving Woods from a traditional mail order business to a more vibrant, more caring online brand.

Woods Healthcare started in the mid-eighties offering supplements via press ads and home-delivery.

Buying healthcare supplements is an act of faith. But people still shop around. The consumer’s dilemma is: I want good value – but I also need a brand I can trust. Customers have no empirical basis for believing that their purchase contains either the exact ingredients or strength of formulation stated on the pack.

Our research showed that Woods customers appreciated the brand’s excellent value, and experience had taught them to trust what Woods said on the pack – something they had learnt not to with some other value brands.

INTRODUCING WOODS

Established as a mail order brand in the eighties, Woods were in a way ahead of their time.

Bypassing high street distribution, they were able to offer low prices, and our consumer research indicated a large and loyal audience of older people. However, the research also showed that consumers were neutral at best about the brand’s identity, the customer base was ageing, the brand proposition was weakly communicated, and the brand had no emotional appeal.

Our research showed that – likely spurred along by new buying habits formed in the pandemic – even Woods quite elderly customers were moving their purchases online.

The Pull Agency’s Brand Blueprint™ for Woods aimed to evolve the brand from an old school mail order company to a vibrant and up-to-date looking brand with a clear proposition and some emotional impact. Thus providing appeal for new Gen X & Millennial customers targeted by online campaigns, while not alienating Woods existing customer base.

RESEARCH

The Pull Agency conducted substantial quantitative and qualitative research with a survey of 2,000 Woods customers.

The client knew their customers skewed older, but they were surprised to learn that 89% were ‘Boomers’, and most of those retired. We discovered Woods customers were not health or supplement obsessives, taking supplements for preventative reasons. They see supplements as essential to maintaining health and wellbeing. This attitude had strengthened over the recent pandemic period.

The pandemic also led to many visiting the high street less and more buying online. This trend led to the eldest segment in the survey actually making the greatest percentage of their supplement purchases online.

Trust in brand quality was a clear factor in purchase and loyalty.
Many customers reporting reverting back to Woods after making other brand purchases that provided what they considered to be less efficacious products.

However, despite strong loyalty indications and strong online buying patterns, there was evidence that Woods’ already elderly customer base – which had develop largely through mail order – was ageing. The brand was hardly bought at all by those under 40. This was seen as a huge danger signal for the brand. Hence our Brand Blueprint™ focused on evolving the brand from archetypal mail order brand to an online one.

WHY BIRDS?

“Woods health cares, reliably delivering quality vitamins & supplements at the best possible prices”. The brand promise distilled down to our tagline, Your wellbeing at heart, called for something that could evoke an emotional engagement with the audience. But that symbolism needed to be more than just warm and fluffy - it needed to represent a deeper meaning from the brand allowing us to convey an authentic brand essence with confidence.

Our research found that birds are commonly used to symbolise care, but are also used to represent ‘delivery’, offering direct synergy with Woods history as a mail order company. Alongside the opportunity afforded by the variety of species and their character as well as vibrant colour, birds seemed an obvious solution.

THE FLOCK

We developed an illustrative family of birds as the foundation of the identity.

The Woods ‘Flock’ then give us a visual narrative, in the first instance acting out a story as the deliverers of Woods supplements to the customer. Secondly becoming advocates for the brand with their bright, healthy plumage.

Our chosen set offers a good selection of sizes, colour and character, allowing flexibility in the way we use them, bringing the brand to life.

THE LOGO

Our bird narrative led directly to our logo marque for Woods. While exploring the theme of a bird delivering the supplements to the customer, its beak offered itself up as the perfect ‘W’ insignia - too simple to ignore, too beautiful a link to dismiss!

When looking for a logotype style, the double-O character combination within the Woods name seemed a gift in that it already goes some way to mimicking supplements/pills. When we looked closer at some common pill shapes the perfect character style became evident.

Woods where also reticent to show photographic pills in all instances, so developing an illustrative impression gave us the perfect vehicle to use when representing a generic product set.

PACKAGING

Much of the market display busy, complex labelling with little personality. Simple, bright, easy to select and read with clear benefits was the plan, alongside distinct, uncluttered branding.

COPYWRITING

The bird theme also lends itself to playful and characterful copy, further injecting personality into what was previously a very dry approach.

PROMOTIONAL

Our distinct brand assets bring any communication format to life, whether that be an event, pop-up display, a simple promotional element or the packing that the product is distributed in. Each develops a strong visual link to the brand.

DIGITAL

The brand toolkit provides strong, distinctive components and colours that enable a bold and confident approach, with a cellular design alongside cheeky copywriting. It also begs to be animated!

CLIENT TESTIMONIAL

“The Pull Agency were instrumental in helping Woods overcome our core business challenges. We needed to evolve from a traditional mail order company into a modern, online brand, and start reaching and appealing to new, younger audiences while retaining our existing customer base.

We were able to focus on the product and logistical changes required, while Pull guided us through a comprehensive and effective process taking care of all aspects of our brand identity.

With a solid foundation of consumer research and their valuable knowledge in our category, Pull worked with us to uncover a genuine vision for our brand. Pull developed a more caring personality for Woods with real emotional appeal, which has had an impact on everything
from the brand name to a renewed focus on providing our customers with health and
wellbeing advice and support.

Pull’s exceptional creative work expresses the brand personality beautifully, with a new and distinct look and feel that’s full of character and charm. Pull made sure that our visual identity is cohesive yet flexible, so that we have the tools to apply it across all of our touch-points effectively. With their brand and creative expertise, Pull have given us everything we need to achieve ‘version 2.0’ of our business”.

Colin Salter / Woods Health