ABOUT

A genuinely good company, but a fading brand.

1-800 Contacts is a trusted brand with a history of offering vision care customers more choices, more value, and better service. With digitally native competitors popping up, however, they needed to reclaim their status as a disruptor. New branding was essential, and a robust research program was the right way to start.

Their previous branding had problems. Over time, it lost coherence and consistency. It opened itself to too much variegated content. Too many looks, too little feel. The tone and voice guidelines had become a license to be funny for the sake of being funny (and the copy often was), but the brand promise, value proposition, and legacy of "finding a better way" had been lost.

Customers needed a clear reason to believe, and 1-800 Contacts needed to understand how to connect.

Our Strategy.
First things first. We needed to define the brand’s opportunity, as well as their customer's shifting behavior. We used a Pivot study, which lent itself well to the needs of 1-800 Contacts. It helped us define and rank the values that the audience for 1-800 Contacts expected from the category. Then we determined which high-ranking values were being overlooked by the category as a whole—values, that is, that 1-800 Contact could credibly claim.

Our process included a custom consumer panel (n=443) through which we identified three key values that would inform our branding:
• Trust is essential where eye health is concerned.
• Perception of service has a major impact on customer choice.
• Immediacy (not just convenience) is crucial.

In addition, we pinpointed a major audience segment, professional females, that we had to closely consider in addition to the overall 18-34 market that 1-800 Contacts already had ambitions of reaching.

“The Better Way.”
Next, we crafted our core insights, such as “customers often choose the wrong product because they lack sufficient information,” or “when lenses run out, customers reorder them in a rush and miss out on improved new products and services.” We then mapped the many moments, appointments, touch points, transactions, frustrations, and missed opportunities common to the vision care journey. With a more detailed view of the customer experience, we were able to better focus our creative branding efforts.

The work we delivered looked and felt different than anything else in the vision care industry. And all of it conveyed the trust, service, and immediacy that customers demand. Above all, it brought the redefined brand ethos to life: "The constant pursuit of a better way." We used illustrations in place of stock photos, hand-drawn typography in place of trade fonts, close-ups of faces in place of poses, and authentic models.

All of it is digital-first—we even included guidelines around signature motions. But everything we designed is also translatable to site, social, email, packaging, signage, out-of-home advertising, seasonal campaigns, augmented reality experiences—everything. We even concepted a series of help videos that are tonally unique from anything in 1-800 Contacts’ competitive set.