ReBrand ReView: Best of Care

Kevin Smith, CEO of Best of Care, sat down to chat about the company’s rebrand. Stick around for a teardown and peek behind the curtain to see how this rebrand went from concept to go-live. 

About the brand: Best of Care is a Boston-based company providing an integrated continuum of care services in the homes of older adults. From non-medical homemaker and companion support to home health aide, care management, and move management, they support older adults, their families, and communities in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. 

Before the rebrand

“Rebranding was just a much different process than I thought it was going to be. Trying to rethink the way that you want to talk about yourself to people is how I would explain it.”

There are infinite ways to explain what a rebrand is. What’s more, there might be 100 different ways your company’s story is being told across an organization. Reeling in that process and dialogue can be a key part of ensuring organizational alignment and identifying gaps. 

“We had already done a lot of work on integrating a lot of different services and teams at our company. We had acquired a move management business, launched a private pay nursing division, and expanded our care management team,” Smith shared. “On top of that, we also had some Assisted Living Locators franchises that we were working with. So, we had all these different and disconnected pieces, names, colors, logos, copy, websites, and the time was really right.”

“As this work was going on, we were also spending time internally to integrate things so that everybody working here understood what those services meant, and to reflect that externally as well. This way, the people we’re talking to—partners, payers, existing families, new clients—could both see, hear, and read a more concise, accurate representation of who we had become.”

With Best of Care’s uniquely integrated, multifaceted care model, doing apples-to-apples competitor research was difficult as a niche category of one. “There are very few comparisons of companies like ours. Sometimes that makes me feel crazy when you're the only one doing it this way. Sometimes it can give you a little bit of insecurity or anxiety,” Smith added. 

“Our team worked together to find common threads because we have pieced together a number of different services from parallel universe industries. What we ended up doing was a really, really deep dive with a series of different teams. From scheduling coordinators, move managers, care managers, nurses, and then a combination of those people who worked across different teams.”

“From the research, we took away a few key themes: calling for consistent language, messaging, company philosophies—and removing any noise or fluff that no longer really made sense. It was an unusual process of elimination but also enhancing and amplifying the most important pieces of each service that we were doing. Then we worked hard to weave them together with a finished product that felt cohesive and coherent.”

How the brand transformed

Sometimes, finding inspiration or building a brand mood board can be quite complicated. Smith found just the cure for white paper syndrome: the anti-inspiration board. 

“I thought about home care brands a lot, since I eat, sleep, and breathe home care. That's all I. It's kind of all I know and do. I approached it from an ‘I know what I don't want to do’ angle. I knew what I didn’t want it to look like. I was ready to move on from a logo with a pair of hands that turned into a house or a heart,” Smith added. 

This philosophy also plays into the rise of anti-branding. Rejecting norms and over-saturated colors, and accepting raw authenticity, social commentary, and real language that everyday people use. 

“From a visual standpoint, I wanted to find something that was very simple, almost binary in its look. I also wanted it to clearly show what we do: the core tenets of our business—without confusing people or having something that felt stale or outdated. That’s almost how we landed on the visualization piece of it, and ultimately what the look of the company now looks like.” They partnered with Triad Advertising to translate this vision into reality. 

How the brand transformed: verbal identity

Non-medical in-home care is a large market. There are hundreds of thousands of agencies out there looking to provide companionship and other personal care, and skilled support to older adults who want to age in place. 

The challenge remains: how do you continue to differentiate and stand out in a market that primarily offers the same menu of services? Best of Care took a wraparound approach by integrating related, sister services. This meant layering in-home care, care management, and move management services together with one seamlessly coordinated experience—instead of three separate phone calls, companies, and schedules. 

Something else that Best of Care did—that is difficult to pull off in the industry—was a concerted effort to fulfill and scale “short shifts,” a side effect of Medicaid authorizations and the unfortunate reality of what 80% of American families can afford. 

Short shifts, for sake of this piece, are anything up to 3.5 hours. Many agencies stay away from offering this model of care (often setting weekly hour minimums of 20 hours per week or more) because it’s difficult to get caregivers to pick them up, and with a stronger focus on private pay, longer-hour shifts. 

“In reviewing competitors and doing other research, I knew what language I didn’t necessarily need to use. I don't need to slap the word ‘senior’ or ‘elder care’ all over anything anymore. This isn’t to say that they're stale or no longer correct, but our audience is the adult children of these people. More often than not, the clients who we serve—the older adults—are not really the people out there calling us and looking for us. It's a family member, an attorney, a proxy, a friend of a friend, or a personal network referral.”

“I wanted to make sure that the language that we used to talk about ourselves was reflective of that in a way that did not feel exclusively senior-focused. I think we did a good job kind of threading that needle.”

To see this work in action, see how the messaging evolved on their website before and after the rebrand. 

The subtle change in the title of the service (Move and Transition Management → Move Management & Estate Support) makes it clearer and easier to understand. 

And, the supporting copy in the rebrand gets to the heart of what families care about during these times of transition and change. They specifically address what matters most, something that families bring up frequently, to ensure that wishes and the (not so) “little things” are honored. 

How the brand transformed: visual identity

Sometimes with branding, less is more. Some brands have a wordmark, others have a logomark. Others have both. Best of Care had a unique reason why they went with just a wordmark. 

“The nature and the personality and the profile of our business doesn't translate as easily to like an image-based logo as I probably thought it did. We looked at a lot of different iterations because I couldn't necessarily land on something that felt super accurate or indicative of who we are and what we can do. That's why I went with the word mark. It was clean, professional, with Best of Care as the top line, which has become a holding company in many ways for our other family of services that live beneath it,” Smith added. 

“The connective tissue is Best of Care. Beyond that, we have a number of great supportive services under that name and umbrella. Our philosophy connects to our decision to move our care management/consulting team away from Tucked-In Elder Care (which is what they were called from their inception to Best of Care). It was more reflective of their connection to the company at large, as opposed to having its own identity.” 

“The goal was to bring Tucked-In Elder Care and our move management arm under that proverbial roof. We still have Moving Mentor, as a name, because it's a great name that has a lot of brand recognition dating back to when we bought it,” Smith added. “It was important to me that their font, look, and color was consistent with everything else. Even at face value, it’s easy to identify it as part of Best of Care.” 

“The blue and gray of it all—in terms of the color story that we went with—reads as professional, benign, and clean. It’s a subtle but elevated look with the font choice and the color palette,” Smith added. 

Have you ever found yourself trying to figure out what font would work best for your brand? Try this technique. 

“I looked at so many word marks because ours is a word-based visual. I looked at—I can't tell you how many times I highlighted and then changed the font and looked at the name Best of Care in a Microsoft Word and went through—every font in the list,” Smith added. I would be very curious to say if there’s a brand out there bold enough to use Webdings as their primary font. *Please don’t actually do that.* 

Let’s look at their before and after logos.

Their typefaces went from Open Sans and Arial to unifying with Arial, paired with a modern, more accessible shade of blue. 

How to ensure rebrand success

Know when to lead and when to follow. “I needed feedback from care managers about the care management piece, from the move managers. I'm not a care manager or a move manager. We needed the experts in the room. I asked them to tell me what you want it to look, feel like, and then we'll make sure that it fits with our existing work,” Smith added. “Culling together the feedback of a lot of different professional people who each have their own styles, preferences, opinions, and ways of describing what they do is not easy to just throw in a funnel and see what comes out at the bottom.” 

Rebranding should not be an isolated marketing activity. “We were working hard internally to connect and understand each other as a company in terms of how the services should work together, how we should cross-refer, etc. Everyone also got a refresher from a language/wording perspective and got comfortable with making referrals. That way, if a home care scheduler was talking to someone who could use move management services, they can take 10 seconds to make a warm hand-off with details to share for the next person. We took the time to ensure that that they could do it with confidence and ease without having to really spin the wheels.”

Assign the right point person for the job. “Make sure you have a very competent and prepared person(s) to oversee this, because of the amount of time that it takes. It’s critical that you keep the process going by answering the questions of the people who are helping you with your rebrand. From a timing perspective, you want to get it done as quickly and as thoughtfully as you can so that your brand doesn't evolve too much in the amount of time that it takes to get the project done,” Smith added. 

“Engage as many people as you possibly can on leadership and administrative people. Don't overlook anybody with a voice who you think might be able to contribute or share a few words about their vision. Sometimes, those considerations can be far more realistic and important than me going on about what the company is. I am in external speak mode most of the time. Getting all the thoughts and ideas from internal folks and operational people at the company really drove this project in terms of how it looks.”

To learn more about Best of Care check out their website: https://www.bestofcareinc.com/ 

Interested in seeing how a marketing partner can help you bring your healthcare company’s rebrand or brand vision to life? Get in touch with Jenn today.