The Strategy
Our research for the client highlighted the fact that trust is a key barrier to consumer sales in the home maintenance services industry, however, when combined with OneGuard’s up-market service/pricing model and the number of competitors out there, we needed to go beyond building trust to position OneGuard.
We needed to shift away from the consumer thinking about this just as an expense, and focus on those that want “One” place that provides confidence, such that, if I’m very vested in my home, my lifestyle, my property, OneGuard is the “white-glove” service provider that reassuringly handles all my home care needs.
We led the client through our proprietary branding process to uncover existing and aspirational brand personality traits. These exercises and additional work by our brand strategy team led to the following traits becoming the dimensions of OneGuard’s brand personality.
- Authoritative
- Responsive
- Empathetic
- Thorough
- Progressive
Other brand development work by our team led to us settling on the Caregiver brand archetype. Reasons for this included the fact that OneGuard’s culture embodied the virtue of working to protect others. Other Caregiver attributes that also applied included:
- The Caregiver seeks to do good for others
- The Caregiver promises safety and support
- The Caregiver works hard to remain a mentor
The new brand was embodied in the development of a new logo, visual branding elements, copy, brand voice and tone, and formal documentation of the new brand so that it could be used not just externally, but to enhance internal focus.
Comprehensive user experience research was also conducted by our team, leading to the development of a new website. Specifically, we focused on improving the customer journey of requesting a quote online. Our team identified that the amount of mental effort required by a user to receive a quote on OneGuard’s current site, also known as cognitive load, was much too high. The site required four steps to request a quote, with five to seven optional steps along the way.
After conducting extensive user research on the customer journey for both OneGuard’s website and competitor websites, we concluded that four steps were far past the optimal number of steps needed for lead generation.
These insights allowed us to propose a new customer journey for OneGuard. The new customer journey now only requires two steps to receive a quote. This was an improvement, among many others, that ultimately led to the success of the new website.
