ReBrand ReView: Caring.com

Jess Hall, Director of Brand and Creative at Caring.com sat down to share the latest about their most recent rebrand and its role in solving critical challenges that Americans face when looking for care options for a loved one.

About the brand: With millions of visitors to its flagship website, Caring.com, Caring is a leading senior living referral service and the nation’s top site for senior care reviews. Founded in 2007, Caring’s mission is to help as many seniors and their caregivers as possible through empathetic, expert guidance. Applying cutting-edge technology to this humane mission, Caring provides relevant senior care information and support, as well as comprehensive senior living and senior care directories for the United States, including nearly 400,000 consumer reviews. Through a toll-free referral line at (800) 558-0653, Caring’s trusted, nationwide team of Family Advisors — who are among the most highly trained, highly skilled, and knowledgeable experts in senior care — helps seniors and their families research and connect to the most appropriate services and support for their specific situations. For more information about our organization and our free services for seniors and their families, please visit http://www.caring.com/about and join Caring on Facebook.

Before the rebrand

Started in 2007, Caring created and nurtured a legacy of helping families find home care providers and communities for their loved ones, with the assistance of Family Advisors. The company began as a personal mission, “when friends caring for their aging parents got together and made this digital solution a reality,” Hall shared.

“We started the rebrand in October 2022 and concluded in December 2023 with the launch of the visual assets. The company was going through a large tech migration, and leadership felt it was a good time to refresh the brand alongside that effort,” Hall shared. 

That end-to-end time frame may feel long, but the average rebrand takes 12-18 months, according to research from Rebranding Experts. More importantly, with large companies or brands with multiple locations and dispersed employees, the rebrand might take longer than a year and/or occur in phases. 

During that 14-month time frame, Hall and team put a lot of onus on doing necessary research that would inform the direction and angle of the rebrand. “We completed 14 interviews with care seekers (our users/audience), three interviews with Family Advisors (call center staff), and four partner interviews. We also completed a quantitative survey with 957 U.S.-based care seekers who had conducted a search for senior living or care in the prior two years,” Hall shared.

This was also the first rebrand that Caring has launched since its inception in 2007, putting a lot of pressure on the team to honor its history while paving a path toward the future. 

How the brand transformed

Before tackling the logistics of the rebrand, let’s talk about the challenges that Caring solved—but also how the caregiving landscape has changed over time. 

“Our target audience has shifted over the years. Prior to our research in 2022, the target audience was individuals aged 65 or older. Most often, it was a woman seeking support for an aging parent. When we worked on this rebrand, we found that care seekers now are skewing a bit younger, closer to their late 40s and early 50s, and into the mid-60s. That doesn’t mean that older populations have stopped seeking support; we just needed to expand the age range,” Hall shared.  

Home care agencies face uphill battles in the fight to find and keep qualified care talent. Senior living communities face similar challenges, but also haven’t quite reached their pre-pandemic occupancy levels yet. 

All around, it’s difficult for families to know where to look for support, and how to discern a good provider from one that isn’t a good fit for their needs. 

Just by looking at the Caring website (before and after the rebrand), there’s a stark change in how they talk to their audience that immediately builds rapport and trust. 

The updated above-the-fold language: 

• Demonstrates their legacy of helping others
• Reinforces its no-cost (to the care seeker) services
• Places an easily accessible search bar to begin the process without friction (and a secondary CTA with a number to call to talk to a Family Advisor)

Strategic positioning and messaging

With the demographic changes that had occurred over the last few years, among other factors, the Caring team had to rethink how they showed up for their audience online, in their messaging, and in their content strategy. 

“The senior care industry is complex because a care seeker’s efforts can come with difficult decisions, diagnoses, and life changes. It’s a challenging and often emotional process. We aim to bring reassurance and calm to that overwhelming process, delivering on what’s most important and useful during that search while also establishing trust,” Hall added. 

Some of the common challenges that family members and caregivers face can include:

• Decision fatigue
• Relational strain
• Depression (and isolation)
• Their own health concerns and challenges

Caregivers often lament not having a roadmap or GPS to walk them through the journey, and Caring is uniquely positioned to address some of those concerns.

For the Caring team, part of their rebrand also meant revisiting various parts of their website, the user experience and interface, and more. “A few shifts we really embraced in this work were avoiding the ‘information overload’ and forced sentimentality. We really wanted to step up to help with a plain-spoken empathy and calming simplicity. No one needs the jargon or category cliches of sunsets—they need someone who can help them in an empathetic, straightforward way that provides a clear next step,” added Hall. 

“For messaging, we really went after three main pillars: utility, trust, and alignment. We meet their needs through the services and content we offer (utility), establish trust through quality service, and align with their personal situation to offer the best solution for their unique needs.”

Visual identity: the brand’s new look and feel

“We moved from a bold green and orange to a palette that represents warmth, trust, and progress. This decision was based on clear feedback from the original qualitative interviews, and then iterated further through focus groups. It took several weeks to land on what we wanted,” Hall added. 

As a new element of the rebrand, they added yellow pathways as part of their visual language, representing “a clear path forward, always moving forward, never looping,” as shared in their Media Kit. 

These subtle visual cues send a powerful message to their target audience in terms of forward movement, even within static formats, like a social media post.

Caring put a lot of emphasis on picking colors that made sense from a modernization perspective and how they pertained to their audience. For example, with their new primary colors, each has a name: Move-in Teal, Supportive Sand, Community Coral, and Golden Years. 

The palette represents “warmth, trust, and gentleness for our clients and caregivers while also inspiring progress in the search,” as shared in their Media Kit. 

The new logo

“The prior logo felt stuck in the early 2000s to many of the people we spoke to during the interview process. We needed a modern and elevated feel, but we also wanted to honor the history of the organization. So, if you look closely at the new logo, it isn’t a flower. You’ll see the “Caring man” still exists within it, but he’s now surrounded by the support of the Caring team, our partners, and the resources for success,” Hall shared. 

The old logo

The new logo

Beyond the structure of the logo, “it’s meant to feel modern, friendly, empathetic, warm, nurturing, and lively – all things we want Caring to be to our audience,” as shared in their Media Kit. 

Honoring the women who make Caring possible

Caregiving is a uniquely and disproportionately female-dominated industry. From the 100 million who serve as family caregivers to the 4.5 million people who serve as direct care workers, caring has historically been (and likely will continue to be) female.

Beyond providing care, women are also the ones who typically look for care and arrange it for their partners, children, parents, and other relatives. 

For these reasons and more, Hall and team sought out organizations, firms, and partners who understand their mission and vision for the future and create an experience and journey that makes caring easier (on all fronts). 

“For strategy, I had the pleasure of partnering with Love & War based in New York City. Kriston Rucker was fabulous. When we switched gears to visual identity, I called my friend Dom Prescott, founder of DapDesignz. We’d worked on several projects together in the past, and she nailed it. As we worked on the visual identity, I also hired Katie Kelly as a full-time lead designer. She brought an amazing eye to the process so that we were set up for success on digital channels. She was the one who brought Dom’s vision to life in all of our design assets. I will emphatically support these creative women and sing their praises whenever I get the chance,” Hall shared.

Rebranding has the power to solve complex problems.

Care is an incredibly complex concept, from acknowledging the need for help (whether it’s for yourself or a loved one) to how you pay for that help—and everything in between. Many people do not even realize that they’re caregivers.

Hall and team came together to create an elevated experience that makes—what can often be—a chaotic and roller coaster-like journey into one with clear next steps and knowledgeable, human support to guide care seekers along the way. 

“I’m proud that our company continues to be filled with people who are passionate about serving seniors and their caregivers. We’ve assisted millions of families across the country with the help of ever-evolving technology and resources. This rebrand is part of that story and our company’s evolution—and that story continues as we live out our mission of supporting as many seniors and caregivers as possible with the empathy and expertise they deserve,” Hall adds. 

To learn more about Caring, check out their website: http://www.caring.com/about

Interested in seeing how a marketing partner can help you bring your health tech company’s marketing ideas to life? Get in touch with Jenn today.