Sunday, December 19, 2010

Wellness Centers of America Launches – Using Blue Sky (and Wong and Me)…

With its first retail location opening soon, Wellness Centers of America reached out to Blue Sky Marketing for the go-to-market strategy and point-of-sale programs that’d power its initial launch and deliver success.

Blue Sky principal Michelle LeBlanc has focused on independent marketing strategic planning and business development. That’s just what she brought to the new program for Wellness Centers of America (called WCOA for the rest of this post). At the same time, LeBlanc had to meet the retail launch deadline with plenty of marketing communications executions, including TV, point-of-sale and marketing handouts.

For these, LeBlanc tapped Betty Wong Creative (Betty Wong) and Signalwrite Marketing Communications (c’est moi: Richard Laurence Baron) to develop initial graphic design platforms and copy positions.

I’ve been working on wellness projects and programs for the past 20 years. Only very recently have strong figures and trends been available to underscore the value of what some people describe as “the positive health of an individual as exemplified by quality of life.” The last time I covered wellness on this blog, I noted:

…wellness needs to be marketed as effectively as possible, from the aging of the American workforce to our cultural search for the Fountain of Youth.

This is under way with WCOA: effective wellness marketing at retail. I’ve had the opportunity to work under Blue Sky’s direction on WCOA branding and key selling points from the outset. You can see some of the POS expressions created by Wong and me at the top of the post.

There’s more: Dave Henry of iFilmProductions created TV in time for the Grand Opening, using personal-approach video storytelling to convey WCOA’s “Five Pillars of Wellness” offer.

The TV spot’s now running in the Atlanta area. The initial WCOA location is open in Deerfield Place Shopping Center – that’s in Alpharetta, GA, a northside ‘burb. And the entire effective retail marketing effort is supported by bright, fresh creative – including Wong’s sunny new logo mark.

Thanks to LeBlanc, Wong, Henry and WCOA for letting me play a role in this new retail effort. Believe me, promoting wellness is worth it.

3 comments:

Richard Laurence Baron said...

In fact, until the late ’50s, this positive health concept didn’t exist. It started to grow slowly around from there until, in 1980 – boom: WELLNESS! I realize this now because of Google’s new language analysis tool, which lets you search for the frequency of the appearance of words in 5.2 million books over hundreds of years:

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/

Very cool app for word-people, I have to say. For ad-guys, too.

Anna Jamiece Roark said...

Great job, Richard! Love the new logo by Betty and the brochure layouts! I feel weller already.

Dave Henry said...

Great work Richard. And thanks for the plug!
Cheers, Dave H.