The Situation
Jackson Hole’s oldest nonprofit, Grand Teton Association had a rich history of running most of the visitor stores within Grand Teton National Park, and then putting all of that money to a wide array of projects within the park that enhanced the visitor experience. The problem was, no one knew that this was what they were doing, and there remained a huge untapped potential for store sales and sold memberships.
A BIG Shift.
As we begun our work together, we began a large audit of all of GTA’s marketing and communication efforts, as well as the current brand that they seemed to be hanging their hat on. After much research, many meetings and brainstorming sessions, we found out a key component of the problem: GTA saw and talked about themselves from an internal perspective. Most of their marketing talked about the projects they supported and the partnerships they had. The main problem with this was that they were leaving out a huge component of how their audience could enter their story, which was their retail stores. We set forth a vision that shifted their organizational brand and marketing from being a traditional nonprofit making a difference that just asked for donations, to being a retail store nonprofit for public lands. Once this shift occured, it opened up a tremendous amount of growth and success potential by just asking their audience to come alongside them by shopping at their stores. All of a sudden, their audince had a reason to pay attention and interact with them.
We rallied this new shift around a simple, concise and memorable tagline:
We then created an entirely new story brand guidelines that captured this new direction, and provided a host of ways to integrate this new brand into current and future marketing:
Integration
Next, we set out on the task of rebranding all of GTA’s marketing materials, and even creating new ones. From emails, to signage, to the website, to merchandise tags, to the way the membership program ran, there was no shortage of work to be done!
Retail
Website & Email
The Teton Art Project
A new idea that was generated through the process was to highlight the use of local and independant artists that GTA stocked their retail stores with. We commissioned our first artist, Haley Badenbop, to create a memorable design of the Tetons to be put on environmentally friendly store merchandise. Despite the slightly higher price tag, the items sold remarkably well, with even celebrities like Sanda Bullock snagging a mug.