ReBrand ReView: WelcomeHome

Chris Mohrman, VP of Marketing at WelcomeHome sat down to chat about the company’s latest rebrand. Stick around for a tear-down and peek behind the curtain to see how this brand refresh went from concept to go-live. 

About the company: WelcomeHome is a CRM purpose-built for both senior living and home care, founded by John Lariccia and Ryan Winograd in 2017. WelcomeHome makes it easier, allowing software to do what software does best and humans do what they do best – connecting with seniors, their families, and their referrers. Visit their website here.

Before the rebrand

Chris and team sat down to refine the V3 of their company’s brand. The V1 story was similar to Nike—a logo on a napkin—and a mission to do great work for great people. For the V2, the company brought in an outside agency to help tell their story when they were mainly known as a Senior Living CRM. Chris came on the scene in 2022, to further accelerate the brand’s growth and develop a strong internal team, culminating in the latest rebrand project and the ongoing development of other exciting, creative endeavors. 

Let’s also set the scene from a consumer’s perspective: the cost of assisted living and home care each rose an average of 10% since 2023. WelcomeHome was known as a Senior Living CRM, but the brand needed some room to flex, as they were looking to enter the home care market. 

What the WelcomeHome team needed to do now was to meet the growing needs of their evolving target market: senior living and home care business owners and operators. This group has changed over time, becoming more welcoming of technology, understanding of its potential, and how it can help their businesses—and ultimately, their residents or clients. It also comes at a time when senior living is less stigmatized and consumers better understand their options.

Telling the story of care

Most brand stories and strategic narratives position the company at the center, as a Hail Mary solution. Not WelcomeHome. They position the senior and the senior's experience at the center of their work, and ultimately, the senior living community or home care agency itself. 

“We often talk about dignity in aging, and at WelcomeHome, we are connected to that ecosystem—a part of that moment in time where people are making a tough and/or joyful decision,” Mohrman shared. 

“The flip side is that you’re in your home and welcoming this assistance, with extra sets of hands, eyes, and people who care about you. ‘I’m at a point where I need that help and choose to stay at home but need some additional help,’” he added. 

WelcomeHome’s technology is the linchpin that connects residents to their community, an important part of a resident’s quality of life. Finding the right community means a resident becomes a part of two communities. The first is the physical community itself. The second is being connected to a community of peers and caregivers, a symbiotic care community. The idea of technology-forward communities even bleeds into the origin story of how WelcomeHome came to be. 

“When we talk about our co-founders, John comes from private equity, and he was involved in engagement with cruise ships, and then also engaging with senior living. For a cruise, it’s a short-term, limited engagement, yet the technology for the team was so current. It just made sense. It was easy. In senior living, on the other hand, the technology was clunky, outdated, and disconnected. That’s where the company idea came from, to make it easy and not get in the way. So many people, administrators, executives, and residents alike, just struggle to adapt technology because it’s old and outdated,” Mohrman added. 

What’s more, John and team didn’t just set out to create a ready-to-go platform in a box. They spent time elbow-to-elbow with senior living operators, digging deep to understand their problems and pain points with existing technology solutions, taking notes on how to do it better and make things easier. 

In fact, the brand’s core values are: 

• Listen
• Care
• Commit

Each of those three tenets was involved in the formation of the company and played a large role in the tactics they used to build the next version of their brand. They didn’t just evaluate direct competitors; they looked outside of the care space and even outside of the tech space. 

“Every month, we look at competitors, their content, and I encouraged everyone to look outside of our space. We looked at companies like Starbucks, Apple, and more. We brought a mix of all of those,” Mohrman shared. The team pondered questions like: 

• What do we like? 
• What do we not like?
• How do we differentiate?
• What can we learn from people who are doing really well? 

Telling the employer story of care

The rebrand wasn’t just about customers—it was about continuing to build a talent brand and culture that attracted passionate, like-minded people who wanted to contribute to a very personal mission. 

“A really cool, proud moment that I had was when the creative team finished a lot of the design work for the rebrand, and one of the creative team members commented, ‘alright, when do we get to share this? When do we get to put this out there in front of the world?’ That feels so good. Here's a team member who's incredibly proud of their work and wants to share it with the world.. That feels good as a team and I’m so thankful for all this team has accomplished,” Mohrman shared. 

Most people have a personal story that connects them and welcomes them to the space, and Mohrman understood this from a deeply personal level. 

“My mom's mom. She was one of three adult daughters making the decision. I understand the decision-making process and the challenges behind each of those decisions in a very real way. One of the things that I love in my role at WelcomeHome is that I get to do the onboarding, explaining why WelcomeHome is in the senior living and home care industries. And in turn, I always ask everyone: tell me how your story personally connects,’” he added. 

For staff members, the story can unfold differently. One example is the story of a team member having a call with a WelcomeHome customer, only to realize that their grandmother lives in one of the customer’s communities. 

WelcomeHome’s ability to support connections between residents and their communities extends beyond the industry itself. It helps to connect team members to each other and to customers. This rebrand helped them to engage more deeply with customers. Now that it’s live, they can connect with their audiences in even stronger ways.

It’s all about the little things.

The WelcomeHome creative team didn’t set out to do a mild refresh of their brand. They were all in. From updating their logo, their strategic positioning, and messaging, every piece of their brand was overturned and reviewed. It was the first time in the brand’s history that each product was going to have its own icons and logo treatment, and consistency was being implemented.

“We realized we needed a flagship brand. This is WelcomeHome as a company, as an entity. And now have products that also need their own identifying markers, their own brand elements.

To ensure consistency, Mohrman and team thought about sharing the brand easily (through their press kit page). This wasn’t just because it would save staff time fielding these types of requests but because their brand’s ethos is “Made easy. Made for you.” And it rings true in everything the brand does.

One way that the creative team incorporated consistency and got employees hyped and connected to the rebrand was through meaningful ideas such as the creative team “came up with these little stickers, with a little diagram of our hex codes. This way, everybody at WelcomeHome could put it on their computer and very easily reference our brand colors. Whether they're building a presentation or they've got different tools that they're using, we are making sure that our branding stays strong across all these different platforms.” 

Beyond the appearance of the company, the team also wanted to reinforce the brand’s name, WelcomeHome, with no space between the two words. It’s one word.

They also did in-depth research into industry parlance to differentiate home care from senior living. This ensured the website content spoke personally to those in each business line, going as far as creating product-based logos and imagery. 

Rebranding takes a village.

Mohrman and team did important due diligence and hard-hitting homework before rebranding and made it their mission to manifest the visual and verbal aspects of their brand’s next chapter. 

They welcomed home a renewed sense of customer understanding, team bonding and culture building, and best of all, a better way to connect with their audiences. 

To learn more about WelcomeHome, check out their website https://www.welcomehomesoftware.com/ 

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