INSIGHTS, BRAND STRATEGY, BRAND POSITIONING, MESSAGING, CAMPAIGN CREATION
Goodwill of Colorado(GWCO) was undergoing an organizational transformation in 2021, having recently merged two separate Goodwill organizations (focused on the northern and southern halves of the state, respectively) to create a $160M state-wide footprint.
With thousands of employees under the new GWCO, the executive team saw an opportunity to unify and strengthen the brand for internal and external audiences, creating awareness to their community impact across 30+ community-based programs and capitalizing on category tailwinds.
GWCO tapped Spectacle to reinvigorate the brand by amplifying the organization’s mission and purpose, driving deeper meaning in the hearts and minds of their audiences.
In our qualitative research and discovery phase, we quickly identified a disconnect between the core mission of Goodwill of Colorado and how it manifested at the retail level. In the United States alone, the secondhand market reached approximately $35 billion in 2021 and is expected to grow to more than $76 billion by 2025, representing a compound annual growth rate during this period of 21 percent — yet GWCO faced misconceptions about where financial and physical donations went, and the positive impact of the organization’s programs had become muddied.
Our challenge was to drive shoppers and donors to choose Goodwill of Colorado because of its mission, in addition to its merchandise selection and affordable prices.
The positioning platform had to cut through the noise and uncertainty. It needed to quickly establish the organization’s leadership position and communicate that it was more than just a thrift store.
Spectacle utilized key category and consumer insights —gathered from quantitative and qualitative research, a retail immersion, and roundtable interviews — to craft shopper personas and develop the new brand positioning platform “Timeless Impact.”
With the positioning established, Spectacle created strategic messaging frameworks and external-facing copy snippets to create a more dynamic and cohesive brand voice to guide their retail experience.
By fully aligning the internal mission with a strong outward brand presence, GWCO could recapture their rightful place as the go-to social, environmental, and values-driven retail brand.
The research and positioning work culminated with Spectacle creating an evergreen, omni-channel ad campaign called “See How Far Good Can Go.”
This campaign squarely focused on Goodwill’s impact on people and planet, highlighting elements of Goodwill’s 30+ programs with statistics that resonated with the wants and needs of key target segments.
The design was modern, playful and employed a visual device that “linked” the continuous story (from shoppers, to donors, to Colorado as a whole) to the positive outcome of purchasing and donating second-hand to GWCO stores. The copy served as a call to action to encourage shoppers and donors to both learn and engage more with Goodwill while deconstructing the deeper “good” in the organization’s mission.
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The result was a brand platform that united the organization internally and helped lay out the marketing communications plan externally across a 2-3 year horizon. The omni-channel campaign idea was launched in December 2022, in applications ranging from OOH billboards and social media to in-store signage. Spectacle continues to support GWCO through various projects from strategic workshops to executional campaign oversight.
