Friday Poll: How Have You Helped a Client Rebrand?

    • 1373 posts
    August 23, 2019 12:08 AM PDT

    Happy Friday, everyone!

    Earlier this week, Radio Ink featured a great article about how Midwest Communications Group's Wausau, Wisconsin, radio stations helped a local orthopedic clinic with their rebranding campaign, after the clinic changed its name (for the first time in about 50 years!) and acquired new staff.

    It's definitely a success story to share with any advertisers who are in the process of changing their brand. The administrator of the clinic, Shane Melenbacker, had this to say: "We like [radio] because you can get a message out clearly and quite quickly to a wide audience. When we rebranded, we really hit radio hard. I must say, that was probably the smartest thing we did." You can read the entire article here.

    So for this week's poll question, we'd like to know:

    What clients have you helped to rebrand their business, whether on a small or large scale? How did they use radio to get their message out?

    Looking forward to reading your replies!


    This post was edited by Rebecca Hunt at August 23, 2019 12:31 AM PDT
    • 121 posts
    August 23, 2019 12:23 PM PDT

    Two examples from my days in the 1980's and 90's working in Detroit at WMUZ-FM:

    Mike Browning's Royal Rent A Car.  Mike's brother in law owned the big Ford Dealership in Royal Oak Michigan and Mike was running the car rentals, mostly to current customers of the dealership.  He wanted ideas on how to increase revenue since he got an override.  We started advertising his rentals about the time he was getting ready to switch up to the new models and sell his rentals to the used car department.

    We asked him if he could sell them direct to the public instead and make more money and the answer was YES.

    We renamed his rental division of Royal Oak Ford to Mike Browning's Royal Rent A Car and promoted the sales of 1 year old cars at thousands less.  Mike took over a bigger lot across the street and was actually now in competition with Royal Oak Ford's Used Car manager.   WMUZ was responsible for the idea, the branding and the years of success.

     

    Steve's Independent Transmission.  A young and honest transmission mechanic took over a tiny transmission shop located in a small former gas station.  It had two bays and the name Independent Transmission.  We made it personal by adding the owner's name and featuring him as the one you talk to.  After a couple of years, they had to expand and tripled their size due to the volume of business we sent them from our WMUZ audience which was his sole advertising at the time.