In the fall of 2021 Mariners planned to launch 4 new locations across Orange County. We needed to do significant marketing and promotion around the new locations. We studied our existing demographics and community demographics as we chose strategic locations, and then again to help refine our messaging to fit contextually in the new areas. The problem was that internally, the campaign title was a non-negotiable from leadership, and since internally it was aimed at continuing to bring people back from COVID to church, it wasn’t a good fit for an external campaign. The language was too churchy.
The series was called You Are _______. The idea was that each week would have a new fill-in-the-blank title reminding people what the bible says about who they are. But the church based words like servant, bride, priest, etc. would not connect with our external target audiences.
To solve this problem, we created two campaigns that were unique, but still connected through purpose and partially through layout and design. Internally, we developed a graphics package that was dark and bold to communicate the darkness people were feeling as people continued to emerge from the isolation of COVID, with a bold typography layout that was centered and prominent in white to stand out, focus the eye, and bring a calm the chaos. The focus is on “you” and who you are. I worked with Michael Khamo on these internal designs.
Externally, we partnered with 454 Creative to developed and run a similar “you” concept with a key difference. Instead of telling people who they are, we told people that Mariners is for you. We build keywords for what our offerings could provide in light of market research about what people were dealing with through COVID (isolation, work life, marriage issues, mental health issues, substance abuse issues, etc.), and focused the campaign around how our offerings could shift those parts of their lives. We build the external campaign to be bright, bold, and diverse, showing who we are while keeping “you” as a constant and focus. The campaign featured people from our community in the areas we were launching.
The campaign was a success. We marketed in print, digitally including email, and social media. Attendance at each of the 4 launches exceeded expectations.
