VSA Partners is celebrating its 40th anniversary! Since our founding in 1982, VSA Partners has become an integral part of the Chicago design and strategy community, and has worked with top brands like IBM, Google and Nike to help companies break through in an increasingly noisy world. 

To mark the milestone of our 40th year, we sought to do something different from the typical approach that companies might take to celebrate such occasions.

“We easily could have focused this anniversary as a retrospective on the exceptional work VSA is known for,” says CEO Anne-Marie Rosser. “But what really makes VSA successful is our people and their laser focus on designing for a better human experience. We knew that any effort to mark our anniversary should reflect the VSA way of thinking that has driven our work for 40 years and will continue to empower us for years to come.”

With this framework, VSA created an insightful, playful and at times poignant video series exploring the power of design in all its forms. The result is a window into the minds here at VSA, and how team members channel the world of design into their work. 

The editorial campaign focuses on a wide range of concepts, from museum branding to detective shows to kitchen gadgets. Each video then explores how these transformational ideas have improved and enhanced the creativity of individual staff members.

“We too often take for granted the products, services and social constructs of the modern world,” says Chief Creative Officer Curt Schreiber. “But when we take time to examine how these innovations have radically changed and improved our lives, we’ll often find deep inspiration for the next big innovation yet to come.”

The video series comprises short videos of less than a minute apiece. Partner and Head of Design Thom Wolfe explains, “The idea is to not overwhelm people with our inspirations, but to encourage them to consider their own sources of inspiration and ultimately create a social dialogue about the role of design.”

The complete collection can be found at [www.vsaforty.com](https://vsaforty.com).

“If just one person or marketer who views this video is inspired to approach their world through human-centered design, we’ll count this as a success,” says Rosser. “When we lead with designing for the human on the other end of the experience, that’s when truly magical things happen.” 

  VSA Partners Celebrates 40th Anniversary With Exploration of Design’s Human Impact

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Ariadna Navarro

Chief Growth Officer

Chief Growth Officer Ariadna Navarro recently shared her thoughts on building breakthrough brands in a piece published on MarTech Series. Ari explores the importance of truly differentiated brand experiences, the cyclical nature of brand-consumer relationships, and how even product-driven, tech companies need strong branding to truly stand out. 

Check out an excerpt below, or click [here](https://martechseries.com/mts-insights/guest-authors/conviction-and-persistence-the-foundation-of-breakthrough-brands/) to read the full article. 

No matter how innovative your product or service is, or how niche of an industry your business operates in, it’s excruciating to find differentiation these days … and it’s a never-ending chase. The acceleration of a perpetually changing future has made it all that much more critical to sharpen the most important tool you have for standing out from your competitors: your brand.

Before digging deeper into how a brand is built, it’s crucial to first understand what we mean when we say “brand.” While many people (even some in our industry) conflate brand with advertising or the products they sell, those are only pieces of what you do that make up the larger idea of who you are. Put simply, a brand is the most compelling articulation of your business strategy—a clarification of what you stand for, and the basis of your relationship with customers. Note the word “compelling.” It has to be true, relevant and differentiated.

#### From bland to brand
Using the Silicon Valley startup landscape as an example, you can see the effects of using product as a brand (PaaB™). Technology is not a differentiator anymore; it’s an equalizer. Although tech-driven, business-model innovation is great, it has to come with the development of brand. Think about how many times you’ve heard a business described as “the Uber of X” or “the Warby Parker of Y.” Just as quickly as those household names upended industries, they were engulfed in a sea of copycats all sporting minimal, templatized UX; clean, muted design; and a familiarly witty, human tone. When ideas are only new for a moment and products are easily imitated, “disruption” becomes more of a category than a way of standing out.

#### What do you stand for?
To avoid fights on features and performance comparisons, it’s up to brands to create a more authentic connection with customers, building relationships and loyalty over time. That’s what I call a “better human experience.”  It’s a pursuit to create value for all stakeholders—employees, customers, investors, clients. But how do you commit to standing for something in an ever-changing landscape? It starts with conviction—fighting the urge to follow every trend or to say something broad enough to appeal to everyone, and instead find what’s true to you and relevant to your audiences. Identifying that sweet spot is what makes the connection between a brand and a customer resemble any other human relationship. For the same reasons love isn’t eroded by a single argument, customers stick by brands that stay true to the values that attracted them in the first place.

Continue reading by clicking [here](https://martechseries.com/mts-insights/guest-authors/conviction-and-persistence-the-foundation-of-breakthrough-brands/). 



The Foundation of Breakthrough Brands

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Ever.Ag, a leader in agricultural software, data, analytics, and finance, recently [unveiled a new campaign](https://www.ever.ag/everything/?utm_source=VSA&utm_medium=pressrelease&utm_campaign=brand) that challenges the limitations of phrases like “farm to table.” The campaign highlights how its solutions help folks working in the global food supply chain manage and optimize the intricate and delicate ecosystem of everything that happens in between the table and the farm. 

Boasting decades of hands-on experience, the new Ever.Ag brand name better represents the depth and breadth of its capabilities. This 360 campaign found the connecting thread of a story encompassing so many of Ever.Ag’s proven successes in the industry. 

Ever.Ag has a diverse customer base that spans the agriculture supply chain. Farmers rely on it to manage risk, food manufacturers use it to help reduce waste, and retailers use it to inform sustainability efforts. This new campaign needed to speak to all of those people and businesses and demonstrate exactly how Ever.Ag can help people drive progress and efficiency in these constantly evolving industries. 


To help create the campaign, Ever.Ag tapped VSA Partners, a creative and strategy agency that designs for a better human experience. VSA’s reputation for making the complex compelling was a perfect fit for telling Ever.Ag’s story and ensuring that its messaging would resonate with a wide range of audiences. 

“At the end of the day, Ever.Ag is here to help the people we serve,” says Toby Lee, Chief Marketing Officer of Ever.Ag. “VSA Partners knows how to take a truly intricate business and find the human story. We’re really proud of how this campaign turned out and the tone it sets for Ever.Ag’s exciting future.” 

VSA worked with Ever.Ag to create a powerful narrative that would lean into the trust that comes from generations of know-how and deep partnerships, as well as Ever.Ag’s innovative technology and visionary data that tackles the industry’s biggest challenges. By upending phrases like “pasture to plate” and “seed to store,” VSA set the stage for conveying Ever.Ag’s vast capabilities and for communicating its status as a premier intelligent supply chain and risk management company in agriculture. 

“Ever.Ag is making a difference in the world around us by envisioning a more fruitful, durable farming ecosystem,” says VSA CEO Anne-Marie Rosser. “This campaign captures the essence of their capabilities without losing sight of the central story—it’s a lot to do, so Ever.Ag does a lot.”

[Click here to visit the campaign's landing page](https://www.ever.ag/everything/?utm_source=VSA&utm_medium=pressrelease&utm_campaign=brand).

Ever.Ag’s New Campaign Showcases How They Simplify the Intricacies of Modern Agriculture

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Chief Growth Officer Ariadna Navarro was recently featured on MarketScale, discussing her views on how businesses can move forward with integrating AI into their operations in an ethical and sustainable way. 

Ari outlines her approach with four pillars: transparency, boundaries, accountability, and education. 

Transparency means that clients need to know how it’s being used. However you’re using AI, and whatever business you’re in, ensure your partners are informed. 

Boundaries entails outlining what AI can and cannot do or be used for. Despite the hype, it’s not the end-all-be-all solution to absolutely everything. 

Accountability is the next pillar. What governance is in place for your use of AI? What are the checks and balances on the output before it becomes external-facing? 

And finally, education—education to empower employees to learn how to use the different platforms, as well as to understand some of the consequences of poorly-managed AI. 

Click [this link](https://marketscale.com/industries/software-and-technology/what-are-the-main-ethical-considerations-in-the-development-and-implementation-of-ai-systems/) to watch the interview. 

Building Ethical, Accountable AI Business Practices 

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Curt Schreiber

Chief Creative Officer

Chief Creative Officer Curt Schreiber was recently featured in SmartBrief with his piece, “What B2B Marketers Can Learn from Luxury Brands.” 

His piece explores how B2B marketers can tap into the same tactics used by high-end consumer goods to create stronger brands and relationships. 

Read the intro below, or click [here](https://corp.smartbrief.com/original/2023/08/what-b2b-marketers-can-learn-from-luxury-brands) to read the full article. 

Consumer marketing tactics are frequently regarded as irrelevant by business-to-business sales operations. B2B, after all, is all about thoroughly educating customers and forming deep sales relationships. And it typically has a longer sales cycle than applies to most consumer marketing.

But there is one category of consumer products that faces very similar challenges to the B2B space and may provide a roadmap for how to create more demand: luxury.

Luxury products are outliers in the consumer marketing realm. Just like B2B products, they too require significant differentiation and relationship-building. However, unlike many B2B organizations, marketers in the category heighten this relationship with strong brand-building and enhanced customer experiences—not just to acquire new customers, but to turn people into super fans who purchase repeatedly and consistently advocate for these products.

I believe these tactics can offer a wealth of opportunity to B2B marketers.

#### High-funnel personalization
A personalized touch is a hallmark of both luxury and B2B. Both types of buyers want to be recognized by name and expect special treatment. Whereas B2B often relies on the salesperson to personalize interactions, luxury starts this journey of meeting personal needs much higher in the funnel.

Highly specialized and personalized communications from the start go a long way toward establishing a transaction further down the line. In many ways, it takes the pressure off the salesperson of having to build the relationship from a cold start, warming the customer with a sense that the company as a whole understands them and their needs. But more importantly, it claims some of the loyalty for the brand itself.

#### Mystique that transforms the buyer
From the earliest marketing interactions, successful luxury elevates the perception of being a part of something bigger than one’s self—something that sets you apart from the masses. Whether it’s a cologne with a slightly odd smell or an interior with an unexpected combination of styles, or even a handbag that might be perceived as gaudy, luxury products demand your attention and impart that attention on the buyers themselves. It essentially changes the conversation from “Should I buy this?” to “How can I live without it?” The customer arrives asking the salesperson not how you fit into their life, but rather how they fit into your world.

B2B can easily employ similar tactics. From adding unexpected, custom-feeling design elements to your product to upgrading packaging for a luxury feel to inviting your customers to an exclusive event, B2B marketers have a wide range of opportunities to enhance the look, feel or other memorable element of either the product or the marketing. The result is a vibrant and enjoyable product experience that helps buyers justify their choice, motivates other employees using the product, and boosts their reputation among their peers.

Click [here](https://corp.smartbrief.com/original/2023/08/what-b2b-marketers-can-learn-from-luxury-brands) to continue reading. 

What B2B Marketers Can Learn from Luxury Brands

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Chief Growth Officer Ariadna Navarro recently appeared on the On Brand podcast, hosted by Nick Westergaard. Ari and Nick discussed the importance of seeing brand as a business asset, how too much A/B testing can ruin a customer experience, and VSA’s process for turning brand differentiation into a tangible human experience. 

Check out the episode [here](https://www.nickwestergaard.com/connecting-brand-to-growth-with-ariadna-navarro/). 

Connecting Brand to Growth

AdForum recently interviewed VSA's Chief Growth Officer Ariadna Navarro to get her thoughts on the future of AI and creativity, and how companies can set ethical, responsible guardrails around the technology.

Check out an excerpt below, or click [here](https://www.adforum.com/interviews/ai-tools-still-rely-on-creativity-more-than-they-threaten-to-replace-it-ariadna-navarro-vsa-partners ) to read the full interview. 

#### Does your agency encourage or deter the use of AI in your work? If applicable, how does your team integrate these tools into the creative process?

It’s a little of both right now. We encourage everyone to use it, but with guardrails and guidelines to keep the work honest, human, and original. At the moment, AI is best suited to things like exploration, evaluation, and experimentation. It can reliably accelerate existing processes — from research and analysis to idea generation and content creation — but it’s equally susceptible to misinformation, redundancies, and both legal and ethical issues that we’re only beginning to understand. 

In other words, AI is an exciting, new option in our toolkit, but it’s nowhere near a replacement for any of the ways we work yet.

#### How does the accessibility of these tools affect the way it is used?

The accessibility factor is core to AI’s success. It’s incredibly rare for a tool to possess both the low barriers to entry and the near-infinite possibilities that AI represents. The open format and widespread availability of this generation’s AI tools have given them access to an unheard-of volume of perspectives, permutations, and information that’s driving its rapid evolution, but that also comes with increasing risk.

While the exponential growth and innovation of these nascent phases is exciting, it’s also why we can’t afford to lose any more ground in understanding and safeguarding against the dangers and threats it could pose.

Click [here](https://www.adforum.com/interviews/ai-tools-still-rely-on-creativity-more-than-they-threaten-to-replace-it-ariadna-navarro-vsa-partners ) to continue reading. 


AI in Advertising 

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Marisa Rondinelli

Strategy Director

VSA’s Marisa Rondinelli, a director of strategy, was recently published by the Association of National Advertisers. Her piece “Why TikTok Trends Are a Marketer’s Best Friend” explores why brands should take social media trends seriously, and how doing so creates better products and stronger customer loyalty. She also lays out actionable steps brands can take to improve their social listening and quickly respond and capitalize on social media trends.

Read an excerpt below, or [click here for the full piece](https://www.ana.net/miccontent/show/id/ii-2023-07-tiktok-trends). 

Today's viral TikTok trends featuring unconventional hacks, secret-menu items and #challenges have led to the emergence of "TikTok products." Born from the real users rather than the boardroom, these trends are forcing brands to respond, wreaking havoc on supply chains and angering retail workers. Despite this disruption, here's why they're the best thing to happen to your business — and how to make the most of it.

As marketers, it's our job to be the voice of the consumer. We research and we listen, we plan and we predict. And yet, [we often get it wrong](https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2020/09/14/marketing-does-not-work-the-truth/?sh=45c267ec2c5b).

Consumers are complicated and unpredictable. Their beliefs don't match their behaviors, and their preferences don't translate to purchases we think they will. So, when they tell us what they want, it's on us to listen — and respond.

Yes, these viral-born products, hacks and ideas can create a diversion from approved marketing plans and leave brand and product managers scrambling. Brands may even feel trapped — [held hostage by the whims of TikTok trends](https://www.wsj.com/articles/tiktok-trends-pink-sauce-product-development-661c4178). But if we look past the initial chaos that's created, we can see them for what they really are: a gift. Because at their core, they're built of the stuff marketers' dreams are made of.

First off, these are authentic endorsements of the brand from trusted voices. Organic exposure from influencers is valuable enough — couple that with the virality of a social media trend and you have grassroots marketing at its finest. Remember when nostalgic millennials discovered the magic that happens when you [put ice cream in a Fruit Roll Up](https://www.foodnetwork.com/fn-dish/news/how-to-make-frozen-fruit-roll-ups-tiktok)? These are moments that build both ownership and brand awareness for your business.

Second, these trends are novel solutions rooted in unmet needs. Social media has created a way for brands to connect with customers like never before and what once could only be obtained in listening sessions is now a dialogue that runs 24/7. When trends like the [cottage cheese and mustard sensation](https://www.thekitchn.com/tiktok-cottage-cheese-mustard-trend-23549816) that captivated the protein-craving community emerge, brands can know in almost real-time what their customers are wanting and how they'd prefer that need to be met.

Finally, these trends showcase sizable demand that equates to strong conversion. It's the kind of clear ROI signal you rarely get from other forms of marketing. Take the Peter Thomas Roth eye tightener that has [repeatedly sold out](https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2021/09/22/peter-thomas-roth-makeup-tiktok-orig.cnn-business#:~:text=Peter%20Thomas%20Roth's%20cosmetic%20products,social%20media%20helped%20drive%20sales.) since the original viral video gained over 50 million views in 2021. Trends pay off.

To capitalize on these moments, there are a few ways brands can ready themselves for maximum impact:

### Listen Up

Top up social listening capabilities to get wind of trends sooner. Better yet, bring creators into the conversation early by creating influencer networks, hosting co-creation sessions, or offering product-previews in exchange for feedback and usage ideas.

[Click here to continue reading](https://www.ana.net/miccontent/show/id/ii-2023-07-tiktok-trends). 

Why TikTok Trends Are a Marketer’s Best Friend

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VSA’s Chief Growth Officer Ariadna Navarro was recently featured on the podcast The Thoughtful Entrepreneur. 

During the episode, Ari chatted with host Josh Elledge about why she believes in the power of brand, the difference between the brand problems of start-ups and the brand problems of large corporations, and how she leads projects from the philosophy “every business problem is a human problem.” 

[Click here to listen to the episode](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1600-practical-solutions-to-thorny-problems-with-vsa/id1394227396?i=1000620158016), and thanks to Josh for having Ari on the show. 


Ariadna Navarro Appears on The Thoughtful Entrepreneur Podcast

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Dana Arnett

Chairman & Founder

VSA Partners is pleased to announce the appointment of its Chairman and Founder, Dana Arnett, to two prestigious boards: the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum Board and the Chicago Public Media Business Leadership Council. 

With over four decades of active involvement in the Chicago business and government sectors, Dana and VSA have consistently contributed to various initiatives, playing pivotal roles in notable projects such as the 2016 Chicago Olympic Bid Committee, the Millennium Park Committee, the Grant Park Music Festival, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Chicago’s nonprofit innovation hub, 1871. Dana's extensive board experience, combined with VSA's expertise, will provide invaluable leadership and insights in addressing the diverse needs of these boards. 

Joining these esteemed boards underscores Dana’s personal commitment and VSA’s firmwide support to the Chicago community: “We are dedicated to leveraging our expertise to support and enhance the vision and mission of organizations that play a vital role in our city's cultural and media landscape,” said Dana. “Through our involvement, we aim to make a meaningful impact and contribute to the continued growth, cultural inclusiveness and success of these institutions."

The appointment of Dana to the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum Board comes at an exciting time as the museum embarks on an ambitious journey to expand its vision and mission. Under the leadership of CEO Erin Amico, the museum aims to redefine the visitor experience, both within its walls and beyond. Dana and Erin will collaborate to champion nature and explore innovative ways to evolve and breathe life into these experiences, creating an enriching environment for the community.



As a member of the Chicago Public Media Business Leadership Council, Dana joins a distinguished group of leaders dedicated to supporting the mission of Chicago Public Media, which includes influential entities such as WBEZ and the Sun Times parent brand. Chicago Public Media is one of the largest nonprofit public media organizations in the country and serves as a vital source of news and information for the city. Guided by respected leader Matt Moog, the council will support the organization’s mission of bringing Chicago businesses, individuals and communities together around human-centered, solutions-oriented journalism that makes a positive difference.

In addition to these new board appointments, Dana continues to foster growth, creativity, and community engagement with a number of national organizations. 

For more information about VSA and its founder, Dana Arnett, please visit www.vsapartners.com. To learn more about the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum and the Chicago Public Media Business Leadership Council, please visit their respective websites: naturemuseum.org and wbez.org.

Dana Arnett Appointed to Two Chicago Boards

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Chief Growth Officer Ariadna Navarro recently appeared on “The Unified Brand Podcast,” hosted by Chris Outlaw. 

During the show, Ari shared how brands can increase their Moments of Impact® (MOIs) by investing in the brand interactions that matter, and using their brand as a filter to decide which moments have the greatest significance for brand recognition and loyalty. 

[Click here to listen to the full episode](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-unified-brand-branding-podcast/id1515780484), and thanks to Chris Outlaw and The Unified Brand Podcast for having Ari on. 

Ariadna Navarro Appears on The Unified Brand Podcast

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 Invenergy, the leading privately held developer, owner, and operator of sustainable energy solutions, recently launched its new website, marking the culmination of a strategic effort to enhance the dialogue around the clean energy transition that the company has been leading for over 20 years.  

The new site focuses on Invenergy’s history, its expansion into new technologies, and showcases the company’s global portfolio and end-to-end clean energy expertise. Notably, Invenergy’s commitment to being a trusted partner and proven pathfinder is a consistent theme throughout the interface. 

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“Invenergy was founded on an entrepreneurial spirit that guides everything we do, and we wanted to reflect that core value in our new website,” says Randy Frink, Invenergy’s Vice President of Marketing. “As Invenergy continues to experience tremendous growth, our new website serves as an essential resource for our customers, partners and employees who have all been key to Invenergy’s position as the premier provider of clean energy solutions.” 

Working closely with global creative agency, VSA Partners, Invenergy developed a messaging platform and visual design that clearly communicates both its offerings and its proactive commitment toward helping each stakeholder navigate their individual journey through the clean energy space.

“Invenergy’s website truly sets the clean energy leader apart in the industry,” said VSA Associate Partner of Client Engagement Jerry Stiedaman. “The new site invites a dialogue with all of Invenergy’s stakeholders and clearly guides the audience to their desired resource.”

“VSA and their partners did a phenomenal job, and we can’t wait to see the response to our new online presence,” says Frink.

The new site is currently live and can be viewed at [www.invenergy.com](https://invenergy.com/). 

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**ABOUT VSA PARTNERS**
VSA’s purpose is to design for a better human experience. As a strategy and design agency, we blend consumer insights and data with human-centered design to activate meaningful, motivating and measurable experiences in an increasingly noisy world. With offices in Chicago, New York and San Francisco, VSA offers a full range of fully integrated capabilities — branding, advertising, data science and technology — all under one roof. VSA is also a proud member of Meet The People, an international family of unified and independent agencies. For more than 40 years, we have delivered solutions for business and creative leaders at some of the world’s most respected brands and forward-thinking organizations, including Google, Nike and IBM. 

**ABOUT INVENERGY**
Invenergy drives innovation in energy. Invenergy and its affiliated companies develop, own, and operate large-scale renewable and other clean energy generation and storage facilities in the Americas, Europe and Asia. Invenergy's home office is located in Chicago, and it has regional development offices in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Spain, Japan, Poland, and Scotland.

Invenergy and its affiliated companies have successfully developed more than 30,000 megawatts of projects that are in operation, construction or contracted, including wind, solar, transmission infrastructure and natural gas power generation and advanced energy storage projects. 


Invenergy’s New Website Activates a Clean Energy Conversation for Today and Beyond  

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Jerry Stiedaman

Associate Partner, Client Engagement

VSA's Jerry Stiedaman recently wrote an article for WARC, “With consumers craving stability, now is the big opportunity for big brands.” Read on for an excerpt below, or [click here](https://www.warc.com/newsandopinion/opinion/with-consumers-craving-stability-now-is-the-big-opportunity-for-big-brands/en-gb/6232) to read the full piece. 

Ongoing consumer uncertainty means that for big brands, it’s time to shine. Despite the call to disrupt and reimagine business—a call that spawned a thousand startups—the national and global turmoil of the past few years (and in the financial sector the past few months) has brought about a significant shift in consumer priorities. The result is a renewed focus on the familiar and reliable.

According to [PwC’s February 2023 Global Consumer Insights Pulse Survey](https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/industries/consumer-markets/consumer-insights-survey.html), 96% of those surveyed said they were planning on adopting cost-saving behaviors in 2023. The study also showed that 69% of consumers altered their non-essential spending in the previous six months. These statistics show that consumers are adopting much more careful spending habits in 2023, and brands will need to make their offerings feel truly valuable amid growing price sensitivities.

The antithesis of long-lasting value? A company with shady credentials or an unproven track record. Startups have been hit particularly hard with this brand connotation—failures have [left thousands of consumers in the lurch](https://nymag.com/strategist/article/what-to-do-when-bankrupt-company-owes-you-money.html). As one example, before its recent sale to e-commerce specialist Retention Brands, the subscription makeup service Birchbox left customers without their monthly boxes for some time. The brand posted a [mea culpa on Instagram,](https://www.instagram.com/p/CkrOcSFvogh/?hl=en) citing “a host of unprecedented setbacks that are affecting all of you, our cherished members.” It’s no wonder that people seek safety over novelty.

The startup landscape is also getting walloped by financial factors. Rising interest rates around the world mean they are increasingly vulnerable to competition. VC funding is radically slowing after [the worst Q4 since 2013](https://www.wsj.com/articles/venture-fundraising-hits-nine-year-low-c2b4774?reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink). And the startup-friendly tech sector has seen more than [100,000 layoffs](https://layoffs.fyi/) this year. This damage was further compounded by the sudden collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) in early March. Many startups relied on SVB for banking and payroll—in fact, [88% of Forbes’ “Next Billion-Dollar Startups” were SVB customers](https://www.svb.com/startup-banking/).

With startups hurting from financial difficulties and reputation damages, more established brands have a clear opportunity here to reposition their offerings and lean into the demand for safety and consistency with a longevity well suited to the task.

So how does the big brand take advantage of these times? Here are three thought starters:

1. Refocus and strengthen your core experience. 

The last decade has seen a barrage of brands differentiating themselves with a veneer of friendly colors and unconventional marketing tactics. While that might get people in the door, it certainly won’t make them stay. By refocusing on stability and strength, you're investing in your company’s future: [Bain & Company](https://media.bain.com/Images/BB_Prescription_cutting_costs.pdf) says that “across a wide range of businesses, customers generate increasing profits each year they stay with a company. In financial services, for example, a 5% increase in customer retention produces more than a 25% increase in profit.” Put simply, existing customers spend more than new customers. Plus, their referral potential gives you a free, built-in acquisition machine.

[To continue reading, click here](https://www.warc.com/newsandopinion/opinion/with-consumers-craving-stability-now-is-the-big-opportunity-for-big-brands/en-gb/6232). 

VSA's Jerry Stiedaman Published in WARC

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Anne-Marie Rosser

Chief Executive Officer

VSA CEO Anne-Marie Rosser was recently published in Forbes magazine with her piece, "How To Accelerate Your Business During A Downturn." Check out an excerpt of the piece below, and [click here to read the full piece on Forbes.](https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2023/06/08/how-to-accelerate-your-business-during-a-downturn/?sh=5acfea2e219c)

The outlook for business right now can feel bleak. Few financial experts can agree on what the economy will look like in even one month. Prices are rising. Customers are nervous. And with such volatile economic headwinds, pulling back and waiting out the downturn might seem like a smart defense. But if we’re honest with ourselves as business leaders, we know that pulling back now is not a defense at all. It’s simply a form of paralysis.

As counterintuitive as it seems, I believe now is the time to play offense. And that doesn’t have to mean spending more. What it does mean, though, is acting bravely and reprioritizing your spend for better effect.

Throughout my decades of experience in the agency world, I’ve gotten insight into a wide range of companies and their tactics for navigating economic volatility. Often, we’ve been working right alongside them. The following tactics are certainly not an all-inclusive list, but they are the mindsets I’ve seen work time and again.

### Define Your Constraints

As I lead an agency that cut its teeth in design, I can tell you that designers appreciate constraints—and they’re not alone. Reflecting on your situation and defining the challenges you face is always the best place to start.

A macro example: Most companies have the dual challenge of needing to address both the acquisition of new clients and the retention and growth of existing clients in any given year. But this looks different based on industry and where the company is in its lifecycle, i.e., its circumstances.

Less mature companies or those that are less recession-proof might still need to drive acquisition as the primary focus. Resetting to metrics that drive acquisition in the near term can help focus on limited resources. Conversely, many companies find that retention becomes the primary focus. This move to retention might mean that the budget shifts to more high-touch activations, such as events and in-person workshops—face-to-face time with clients to deepen relationships.


[Click here to continue reading.](https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2023/06/08/how-to-accelerate-your-business-during-a-downturn/?sh=5acfea2e219c)

Anne-Marie Rosser Published on Forbes

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VSA Partners' Chief Creative Officer Curt Schreiber recently sat down with Ricardo Esteves at DesignRush to discuss how the digital era changed advertising and branding. 

Ricardo and Curt discussed the changing role of traditional branding and advertising, how to be a great desiginer, the biggest trends in advertising and branding, and how AI will impact marketing. 

[Read the full article here](https://spotlight.designrush.com/interviews/vsa-curt-schreiber-digital-era), and thanks to [DesignRush](https://www.designrush.com/agency/logo-branding/brand-strategy) for the feature! 

Photo by AIGA.


Curt Schreiber Interviewed by DesignRush

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Lux Capital, the revolutionary venture capital firm known for its uncanny ability to identify and fund successful innovators in the science and tech space, believes in the power of brand. That’s why it’s invested in a new brand awareness campaign, including a recent website overhaul with VSA Partners.

Guided by Lux’s mission to turn “sci-fi into sci-fact,” the team at VSA Partners set out to capture the rigorous science-based focus that established the Lux brand while presenting the company as a VC powerhouse that manages a $4 billion portfolio. The new work, which includes identity assets along with a redesigned website, comes at a critical time for Lux, showcasing its evolution from investing at the earliest stages of a company to include growth and late-stage investments as well.

“We have a unique reputation among VC firms,” said Lux Capital Chief Marketing Officer Scott Rubin. “Our partners and associates don’t come from the financial world. They are all scientists and engineers, which enables us to dig in deeper and truly evaluate the viability of scientific innovation or emerging technology. With this new brand identity, we’re breaking the mold for what you expect from a VC firm, but we want investors and innovators to recognize this difference. It’s who we are at our core, and VSA Partners did a phenomenal job of helping us tell that story.” 


“We’re seeing venture capital become increasingly crowded,” says John Sheehan, Partner, Client Engagement at VSA San Francisco. “Lux Capital’s commitment to expressing their brand is a valuable, differentiating asset that other VCs are simply leaving on the table.” 

The redesigned website at [LuxCapital.com](https://www.luxcapital.com) allows visitors to take a journey through both the firm’s mission and portfolio, showcasing how Lux Capital is every bit as innovative as the startups and established companies in which it invests. 

VSA Creative Director Michael Trovela notes, “We approached the UX and content strategy for Lux Capital’s new site with the goal of telling its story by highlighting the companies it grows and the innovations it enables. That direction led to us a site design that emphasizes the interconnectedness between people, companies and ideas. It’s a visual blending of these elements that showcases how the success of Lux Capital’s approach is its own interconnected innovation.”

“We’ve been helping companies realize their brand purpose and lift themselves above the competition for a long time, but this is some of the most rewarding work we’ve ever done,” says Sheehan. “Lux Capital is a firm that’s truly committed to making the world a better place. From biotech startups working on methods for restoring eyesight to firms involved in making workplaces safer through new robotics, they’re consistently at the forefront of science and innovation. The chance to delve into this background and to help them establish the next chapter of their evolution was truly an honor.”

VSA Partners Designs New Website for VC Firm Lux Capital

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Dori Tunstall recently visited the Design Observer podcast “The Design of Business | The Business of Design,” hosted by VSA’s Dana Arnett and dreams • design + life CCO Kevin Bethune. Dori Tunstall is Dean of the Faculty of Design at OCAD (Ontario College of Art & Design) University in Toronto. Throughout her career, Dori has infused the principles of design anthropology into the corporate world and has helped establish design anthropology as an academic field of study. Her new book, “[Decolonizing Design: A Cultural Justice Guidebook](https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262047692/decolonizing-design/),” was just released on February 14. 

Ever since she was a child, Dori was a maker and doer. As her passion developed, she began trying to understand why people make things and the meanings behind the things they make. She saw that design decisions have a major influence on what we see, what we feel and what we experience out in the world. 

Dori spoke with Dana and Kevin about design’s place in the world and her role in shaping how people utilize design and make it work better for everyone.

“Design’s superpower is its ability to open up other possibilities of how we do things and see things and experience things in a way that helps people decide: ‘Ah, this pathway might be better.’ So the work is equipping our students with the skills and the knowledge and the confidence to be able to do that. And, I would say, educating our clients on the real implications of the decisions they’re making.”

As one of the leading minds and proponents of design anthropology, Dori discussed the forces that have ruled design in the past, and the transition to new design systems and possibilities that are emerging today. Her goal is to instill more fearlessness and deeper interconnectivity as a means to give designers more freedom within the constraints they face on a daily basis. 

“You’re not going to get their creativity, their innovation or their passion if you stop them from being who they are,” Dori said. “The onus is on design businesses not to crush that.

One advantage of being a professor is that I see the future every day in the work of my students. They care about using design to make the world more equitable and sustainable. How do we make a living and how do we make a better world, and can we get those two goals in alignment?”

“The Design of Business | The Business of Design” is a podcast from Design Observer, now in its 10th season. Dana Arnett and Kevin Bethune co-host the show, exploring how design works within complex organizations to shape decisions and processes, drive innovation, evolve products and services, and more. 


[Click here](https://designobserver.com/article.php?id=40580) to listen to the episode and learn more about this Design Observer podcast. 

Dana Arnett and Kevin Bethune Interview Dori Tunstall

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VSA Chief Creative Officer Curt Schreiber joins a select group of agency and industry experts who will choose the winners of this year’s [REGGIE Awards](https://www.reggieawards.org/). For 40 years, these awards have been a highly anticipated annual showcase from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), the U.S. advertising industry’s oldest and largest trade association. The awards recognize campaigns that combine strategy, originality, execution, results and business objectives. Last year’s best-of-show award was taken home by Mischief @ No Fixed Address for its work on the beauty brand eos. 

“It’s always fun to see and reward great creative work that builds true business value,” Curt said. “My experience with the REGGIE Awards will be all that much richer because the criteria so closely mirror VSA’s ethos of combining strategy, design and measurement.” 

REGGIE Award categories span experiential, digital/social media, sponsorship, influencer, brand purpose, content, B2B and age-specific campaigns. Gold, silver and bronze winners are selected in addition to the best-of-show Super REGGIE, which is drawn from the gold winners. All winners will be revealed at the REGGIE Awards Gala on April 27, 2023 at the ANA Brand Masters Conference in Bonita Springs, Florida.

VSA celebrated its 40th anniversary in November 2022. Longtime clients include Google, Nike and IBM, and VSA has offices in Chicago, New York and San Francisco. VSA belongs to the international family of unified and independent agencies led by Meet The People.


Curt Schreiber Appointed Juror for 2023 REGGIE Awards by the Association of National Advertisers

Headshot of Chief Creative Officer Curt Schreiber

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VSA’s Dana Arnett and dreams • design + life CCO Kevin Bethune sat down with [Morningstar](https://morningstar.com/) CEO Kunal Kapoor on their podcast, “The Design of Business | The Business of Design.” Before assuming his current role in 2017, Kunal served as president, during which time he was responsible for product development and innovation, sales and marketing, and driving strategic prioritization across the firm.

Dana, Kevin and Kunal discussed the role of design in transforming the way investors interact with financial data—for deeper insights and more personalized strategies.

“One of the beautiful things about Morningstar and one of the reasons I was drawn to it was this notion of design, technology and research coming together,” said Kunal. “It really spoke to me and demystified something that seemed far more complicated than it ultimately was.”

Kunal revealed that design can be a powerful engine of growth—a problem-solving tool that improves how an organization operates and the benefit it brings to its customers. At Morningstar, it’s woven into the fabric of nearly every touchpoint, from how it designs its offices to its product managers and designers working side by side, to designing a brand architecture that ties a through line from the organization’s roots to the present day. 

“We're all creatures of habit,” Kunal said. “Part of the role of design is to help evolve how we think about those habits.”  

“The Design of Business | The Business of Design” is a podcast from Design Observer, now in its 10th season. Dana Arnett and Kevin Bethune co-host the show, exploring how design works within complex organizations to shape decisions and processes, drive innovation, evolve products and services, and more. 

[Click here](https://designobserver.com/article.php?id=40578) to listen to the episode and learn more about this Design Observer podcast. 


Dana Arnett and Kevin Bethune Interview Kunal Kapoor

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We are honored to share that the work for “Until Justice Just Is” received a Bronze Award in this year’s Anthem Awards. The Anthem Awards, founded by The Webby Awards, celebrate purpose- and mission-driven work from people, companies and organizations worldwide. 

VSA developed “Until Justice Just Is” in collaboration with the YWCA, a group famous for its advocacy and support for women. But the organization has also stood on the front lines of eliminating racism for well over a century, and during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, it wanted a way to invite people to join its mission—and empower them to make a real, measurable impact. The site, [untiljusticejustis.org](https://untiljusticejustis.org/), gives individuals and companies a place to publicly pledge their support for antiracist efforts, access tools and resources to use in their own communities, and join the YWCA’s Racial Justice League, where they can share best practices and hold each other accountable for change. 

[Click here to view the case study.](https://vsapartners.com/work/ywca)

Congratulations to the current VSAers who contributed to this work: Kim Mickenberg, Avery Gross, Jess Sochol, Susan Pfeifer, Emily Gorski, Bryan Haney, Sam Stalling and Amy Bretz.

And to the rest of the team: Chrystine Witherspoon, Elle Abarca, Evan Thompson, Melanie Trombley, Tré Seals at Vocal Type, Darrell Booker, Daniel Delgado, Ben Strang at Sarofsky and post-production audio house [Another Country](https://www.anothercountry.net/).


VSA Partners Wins Anthem Award

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VSA’s Jerry Stiedaman, Associate Partner, Client Engagement, was recently published in MedCity News. 

His article, “Healthcare and Gen X: 4 Things Marketers Need to Get Right” examines how despite its spending and decision-making power, Gen X is routinely overlooked by healthcare marketers. 

Jerry outlines why healthcare marketers should consider the Gen X audience, and the four steps to winning the generation’s loyalty and attention. 

An excerpt of the article is below. [Head to MedCity News to view the full piece.](https://medcitynews.com/2023/02/healthcare-and-gen-x-4-things-marketers-need-to-get-right/)

## Healthcare and Gen X: 4 Things Marketers Need to Get Right


When it comes to healthcare marketing, Generation X once again gets the short end of the attention stick.

Overshadowed by boomers—a prime target for healthcare advertising dollars as they age and require more care—and millennials—the holy grail audience for the emerging health-tech industry—Gen X’s unique healthcare needs and position often leave its members underserved and mostly ignored.

This oversight is a massive missed opportunity for healthcare marketers. First off, Gen X is at the height of its spending potential. Its U.S. population of 65 million has saved a collective $13 trillion and owns 29% of the nation’s household wealth (versus just 6.4% owned by millennials).

It’s also the sandwich generation, which means Gen Xers make healthcare decisions for their aging boomer parents and their millennial children in addition to themselves. Gaining the attention and loyalty of just one Gen X consumer can grant healthcare marketers a fast-track audience with all of their family members.

Just like its neighboring generations, Gen X has unique perspectives and needs that marketers must know. Here are four ways that healthcare marketers can better connect with their Gen X consumers:

#### 1. Make it branded 

Gen X was the first real healthcare consumer, coming into purchasing power after the patient rights movement of the 1970s and the healthcare consumer rights movement of the 1990s. It also witnessed the rise of pharmaceutical ads targeted directly to consumers, which began as early as the ’80s and exploded full force in the late ’90s. As with other buying experiences, Gen X is accustomed to shopping around for its healthcare.

Gen X’s comparison for the self-determined selection of healthcare experiences makes investing in a brand critically important for healthcare businesses. Companies need to invest in a strong brand that stands out from competitors and creates a connection with the Gen X consumer. Ensuring a consistent, clear narrative across all points of the consumer journey demands a brand that is well-equipped to carry its message.

*To view additional steps on how marketers can attract and win the Gen X audience, [check out Jerry’s full piece on MedCity News here.](https://medcitynews.com/2023/02/healthcare-and-gen-x-4-things-marketers-need-to-get-right/)*

Healthcare and Gen X: 4 Things Marketers Need to Get Right

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Kim Erwin recently visited the Design Observer podcast “The Design of Business | The Business of Design,” hosted by VSA’s Dana Arnett and dreams • design + life CCO Kevin Bethune. Kim Erwin is the Director of the Equitable Healthcare Lab and Associate Professor of Practice at IIT Institute of Design. She is also the co-founder of the Institute for Healthcare Delivery Design at the University of Illinois Chicago and the author of “Communicating the New: Methods to Shape and Accelerate Innovation.”

Kim joined Dana and Kevin to discuss the role of design in delivering care, the challenge of traditional innovation processes when applied to healthcare, and the importance of approaching problems from a systems-aware perspective:

“In order to fix it, in order to begin to innovate in it, you need to have this systems-aware perspective. Most designers want to move outside the health system because there’s more latitude. However, anything that you create that’s outside the system by design is of no interest in the system. And so the ability to get scale, to reach all the people you need to reach—these are the limitations of traditional innovation methods applied to healthcare.”

“The Design of Business | The Business of Design” is a podcast from Design Observer, now in its 10th season. Dana Arnett and Kevin Bethune co-host the show, exploring how design works within complex organizations to shape decisions and processes, drive innovation, evolve products and services, and more. 

[Click here](https://designobserver.com/article.php?id=40576) to listen to the episode and learn more about this Design Observer podcast. 


Dana Arnett and Kevin Bethune Interview Kim Erwin

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VSA’s Dana Arnett and dreams • design + life CCO Kevin Bethune sat down with designer Norman Teague on their podcast, “The Design of Business | The Business of Design.” In addition to his studio practices, Norman Teague is Assistant Professor in the University of Illinois Chicago’s industrial design program.

Norman joined Dana and Kevin to share his thoughts on embracing collaboration, building community and shaping the evolving story of design:

“We all understand what’s happened with design history, and maybe it would be different if some of us were in charge of those recording moments. But I feel like the recording from this point on will show Blackness if I have anything to do with it. And so the best way I can do that is just to look at ways in which I can collaborate. How does that work influence me? How does it look today from a Black standpoint?”

“The Design of Business | The Business of Design” is a podcast from Design Observer, now in its 10th season. Dana Arnett and Kevin Bethune co-host the show, exploring how design works within complex organizations to shape decisions and processes, drive innovation, evolve products and services, and more.

[Click here](https://designobserver.com/article.php?id=40575) to listen to the episode and learn more about this Design Observer podcast.

Dana Arnett and Kevin Bethune Interview Norman Teague 

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VSA Partners recently announced the hiring of Thaddeus Ternes as its new Vice President of Technology. In this position, Ternes will be charged with expanding and growing the firm’s technical capabilities in the areas of app and web development, as well as working with emerging technologies such as extended reality, connected devices, ambient computing and other nascent technologies.

VSA CEO Anne-Marie Rosser is very excited at the additional capabilities Ternes’ hiring brings to the agency’s client roster. 

“We couldn’t have been more fortunate in finding someone as talented as Thaddeus to fill this role,” she said. “His deep background in software development, along with his many years in digital marketing, give him the perfect set of skills for leading us into new-tech arenas that will further bolster our ability to design for a better human experience.”

Ternes comes to the position after half a decade with Accenture. There he distinguished himself as a leader in “human-centered technology,” developing complex initiatives with an eye on keeping human interaction simple, accessible and intuitive. In his most recent role, he was the Principal Creative Technologist and Experience Architect at Accenture Song in Austin, where his work included designing services for smart cities, intelligent logistics operations and frictionless retail experiences.

“Making technology more meaningful and inclusive is my passion, and I could see very quickly that it aligned well with VSA’s purpose,” Ternes said. “It’s an exciting time for technology. We’re on the precipice of huge breakthroughs, and with that comes a responsibility to ensure people remain our priority, and that new technologies are used to elevate, not complicate, their experiences.” 

“It really is a great match,” said Chief Creative Officer Curt Schreiber. “Thaddeus has spent much of his career interrogating what human-centered technology looks like, and that focus on the user is exactly what VSA designs for. This investment in our capabilities will enable us to activate our ideas across the creative landscape.”

Rosser agrees: “We are continuously pushing VSA Partners to be at the forefront of technological innovation in the branding world. This hire solidifies our commitment to only providing our brand clients with the best possible solutions for evolving and growing in today’s technology-rich environment.”

Ternes assumes his new position immediately and is already engaging on client projects for the agency. 

“Knowing the breadth of his past accomplishments, I can’t wait to see the impact he has with our roster of clients,” said Rosser. “The work is sure to be impressive.”


VSA Partners Welcomes Thaddeus Ternes

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Marcia Lausen recently visited the Design Observer podcast “The Design of Business | The Business of Design,” hosted by VSA’s Dana Arnett and dreams • design + life CCO Kevin Bethune. Marcia Lausen is Director of the UIC School of Design and Founder of the Chicago office of Studio/lab. Following the 2000 presidential election, she also played a leading role in Design for Democracy, a national election design reform initiative from AIGA. Her book of the same name, “[Design for Democracy: Ballot and Election Design](https://ucp-press-web10.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo5723477.html),” explores design models to improve the election process. 

Marcia joined Dana and Kevin to share her thoughts on the difference between brand and identity, the importance of integrating the roles of practitioner and educator, and learning to be a leader: 

“I was not someone who was outspoken or saw myself as the leader of anything. But what happened is I became good at something and gained a lot of experience and skill. And it’s that ability that made me brave enough to be in front of people.” 

“The Design of Business | The Business of Design” is a podcast from Design Observer, now in its 10th season. Dana Arnett and Kevin Bethune co-host the show, exploring how design works within complex organizations to shape decisions and processes, drive innovation, evolve products and services, and more. 
 
[Click here](https://designobserver.com/article.php?id=40568) to listen to the episode and learn more about this Design Observer podcast. 

Dana Arnett and Kevin Bethune Interview Marcia Lausen

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VSA’s Dana Arnett and dreams • design + life CCO Kevin Bethune sat down with Richard Ting on their podcast, “The Design of Business | The Business of Design.” Richard Ting is the Vice President of Design for Revenue at Twitter and the former Chief Experience Officer at R/GA. He is also Co-Founder and a board member of LAAUNCH, a nonprofit created to combat anti-Asian hate crimes and increase Asian representation. 

Richard shared a broad overview of the thinking that has built a career steeped in community, design and functionality. He began his career at R/GA based on his admiration of its ability to leverage both design and technology. 

“I think if agencies or companies overindex just on science and technology, you lose a little bit of the emotion—the visual finesse that should be applied to products. And if companies overindex just on art and design, they can’t always push the experiences forward.”

Richard also spoke about how the best kind of design is deeply strategic, how he stays connected to culture, and how admitting what you don’t know is the first step to keeping up with the internet. 

“The Design of Business | The Business of Design” is a podcast from Design Observer, now in its 10th season. Dana Arnett and Kevin Bethune co-host the show, exploring how design works within complex organizations to shape decisions and processes, drive innovation, evolve products and services, and more. 
 
[Click here to listen to the episode](https://designobserver.com/feature/s10e6-richard-ting/40567) and learn more about this Design Observer podcast. 


Dana Arnett and Kevin Bethune Interview Richard Ting

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VSA Partners is thrilled to announce we received a Platinum, two Golds, and a Silver award in the 2023 Graphis Advertising Awards program. 

The Platinum and two Gold awards went to three spots created as part of the “Invite Knowledge In” campaign for Pearson’s Connections Academy. 

The Silver award was given to work performed for Affirm B2B’s “Turn Up the Volume” campaign. 

VSA is honored to have received these accolades from the 2023 Graphis Advertising Awards program, and deeply grateful to the incredible team members who made it happen.

Read on below for a little more about each of the projects!

**Connections Academy: Platinum, Gold Awards**

Connections Academy is a tuition-free online educator. They came to us looking to elevate their brand from the sea of sameness that typifies the marketing in their industry–in so many words, “kids in front of screens.” The goal was straightforward: Increase brand awareness, recall, and favorability.

Connections Academy’s approach to online learning brings an inspiring curriculum directly into the homes of their students and their families. Taught by educators trained specifically in online learning, they really do “bring the lessons to life.”

So for our creative approach, that’s exactly what we did. In a series of films, we encouraged viewers to “invite knowledge in” by showing historical figures (symbolizing Connections Academy’s range of academic subjects) brought to life and dropped directly into the worlds of our students. From Cleopatra and Newton on a schoolbus, to a centaur in the hallway, to a medieval knight removing his shoes before heading inside, we created a visual landscape that drove home our clients’ point of difference, and stepped completely outside the creative conventions of the industry.

The finished work was unlike anything else in the category, and the clients were thrilled with the elevated and highly differentiated new look this work gave to the brand.



**Affirm B2B: Silver Award**

Affirm is a buy now, pay later (BNPL) platform that offers shoppers the option to pay for their purchases in installments, without the late fees, hidden charges, or fine print associated with credit cards. VSA Partners was engaged by Affirm to develop a B2B Campaign Platform and Integrated B2B Brand Identity that would target small-to-midsize, direct-to-consumer, e-commerce companies and drive adoption. While the B2B program had great numbers on its side (85% average order increase when using Affirm, 50% more conversions, and 7.2 million Affirm users), it lacked a cohesive brand expression system and a clear and unified point of view.

VSA was tasked with moving Affirm from a tactical marketing strategy to a holistic, compelling point of view. We needed to rally the brand around a “big idea,” and unify their marketing efforts into a cohesive platform that tied all their messaging together. To do so, we created an identity, messaging, branding, advertising, and a campaign platform that could be used across multiple channels to drive differentiation in the category. This assignment included the creation of a clear narrative as to why merchants should consider Affirm as their partner, a playbook for how this brand expression system could be carried out into future activations, and direct tie-ins to integrate this new brand system with the existing Affirm brand identity.

Affirm B2B needed a strong POV that could ladder down into multiple applications. It also had to hit the right tone—B2B marketing often suffers from a lack of personality and a feeling of inaccessibility. Considering that this work would target small businesses, our approach needed to buck the trend and instead exemplify warmth, kindness, and a pro-business attitude. It also needed to convert skeptics by positioning Affirm as a trustworthy, professional partner, without losing the bold and approachable personality Affirm is known for.

Our approach centered on educating potential merchants on the possibilities Affirm unlocks, as well as Affirm’s commitment to partnership and merchant success. We also leveraged Affirm’s unique competitive advantage, carrying the optimism, positivity, and energy that competitors lack through our messaging and brand expression.

The central campaign platform rallied around the cry to “Turn up the volume,” which emphasizes Affirm’s ability to increase conversions, customer love, and sales for businesses. This idea was carried out into the visual identity, key messaging, core assets, and a playbook for external and internal partners to work from. Throughout all the materials, we focused on infusing flexibility into our expression system, both in copy and design. The system itself is simple, but allows for a multitude of combinations and mediums. Every design element was thoughtfully crafted to symbolize growth, which builds in a cohesive story while still offering a range of options to the Affirm team. This interchangeability allows for messaging, imagery, and even graphics to easily be swapped in and out for each other—without losing the strong point of view.

The brand expression developed for the Affirm B2B team took the overarching brand identity and housed a new, dedicated expression beneath it that was well-suited for the target audience.

In messaging, we highlighted smart, approachable, optimistic, and bold as the target tones for all B2B branded assets. One manifestation of this tone is that rather than simply write out stats or RTBs, we look for clever, relevant, and novel ways to frame them. This approach was critical to leveraging the compelling statistics that Affirm B2B had about its user base and merchant success, and implementing them into the overall brand identity.

The selected typography straddles personality and functionality, bringing structure and clarity to our message without losing the Affirm touch.

Colors were carefully selected from the Affirm brand identity palette to build a dedicated Affirm B2B palette that felt warm, bold, and optimistic; and photo-editing was designated in line with the Affirm aesthetic, like harsh drop-shadows behind objects.

And, finally, the graphics symbolize various pillars of the Affirm brand. For example, the arch graphic speaks to the volume of sales, conversions, and customers in a playful way; the speech bubble highlights customer testimonials and quotes; and the wave graphic represents the upward mobility clients will see with Affirm, as well as the growth potential and allusion to volume of sales.

The final campaign platform for Affirm was launched across video, social, ebook, and more. We also provided Affirm with a playbook they could use for additional B2B campaigns and branding. VSA continues to apply this campaign wrapper across several B2B campaigns and communications for Affirm B2B; the playbook also offers Affirm guidance on how to leverage the system for their in-house team as well. Our new B2B campaign transformed the way they go to market, and gave them a compelling new value proposition—plus all the tools they needed to bring it to life.


VSA Partners Wins Multiple Graphis Advertising Awards

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VSA’s Chief Growth Officer Ariadna Navarro was recently a guest on the podcast Rockstar CMO FM, hosted by Ian Truscott. 

Ari and Ian examined how the role brands are expected to play in society has shifted: as the institutions that once acted as moral compasses failed or ceased to command respect, society has increasingly turned to corporations to provide the same level of ethical guidance we once expected from religions, governments, and educational centers. 

In fact, some brands even command a cult-like status not unlike a religion, with passionate communities rallying around a charismatic business leader. 

Ari and Ian discussed how brands can embrace this newfound role as purpose-providers with responsibility and credibility, and how embracing brand as a business asset can help brands build purposeful growth throughout their entire ecosystems and successfully articulate their offerings to consumers. 

[Check out the link here to listen! ](https://rockstarcmo.com/139-the-hola-to-opportunities-ariadna-navarro-of-vsa-partners-and-storytelling-over-a-cocktail-episode/) Ari and Ian's interview begins at 00:27:25. 


Ariadna Navarro Guest on Rockstar CMO FM

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VSA CCO Curt Schreiber was recently interviewed by Little Black Book’s Ben Conway. The article, “Chasing the Big and Sweating the Small,” explores Curt’s design origins, as well as the founding principles of VSA Partners. Curt shares what he’s learned about design and running a business during 30 years at VSA, including how our purpose to design a better human experience has guided the company’s transition from a boutique design agency to a brand-led customer experience agency. 

Here's an excerpt from Curt: 

“Early on, virtually all of the VSA staff were designers. As designers, we wrote the proposals, managed the projects, delivered the production files—and designed as well. As we grew, the opportunities required greater and more specialized skill sets. We hired strategists, developers, project managers, video editors, and content managers. We also opened offices on the east and west coasts to access more talent and better serve clients. 

The design practice has always been integral to VSA’s DNA. Today, we consider ourselves a brand and strategy agency, and our capabilities have expanded far beyond what we started out with. But it all still comes down to design—just a different concept of what ‘design’ looks like. VSA’s purpose is to ‘design for a better human experience.’ So whether you’re a strategist, developer, or producer, every person in the company has a valuable role in design.”

[Check out the article here](https://www.lbbonline.com/news/chasing-the-big-and-sweating-the-small-with-curt-schreiber) for the full interview.

Chasing the Big and Sweating the Small with Curt Schreiber

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VSA’s Chief Growth Officer Ariadna Navarro was recently a guest on the JUST Branding podcast, co-hosted by Jacob Cass and Matt Davies. 

In this episode, Ari tackles the rise of “blands”—a category of brands that while claiming to offer a completely unique product, adopt an almost uniform visual identity and voice.

[Check out the episode here](https://justcreative.com/blands-vs-brands/) or below to hear more about what a bland is, why blands became so popular, and how companies that once embraced the blands can create a stronger, longer-lasting brand legacy. 



Ariadna Navarro Is Guest Speaker on JUST Branding Podcast

Compilation image of Jacob Cass, Ariadna Navarro, and Matt Davies' headshots

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VSA Partners is proud to announce six moves within our executive suite, including a new CEO and the naming of three partners.

After serving for two years as President, [Anne-Marie Rosser](https://vsapartners.com/about/anne-marie-rosser) will ascend to the role of CEO at VSA Partners. She will succeed [Dana Arnett](https://vsapartners.com/about/dana-arnett), who after four decades at VSA, will take on the title of Founder and Chairman. [Ariadna Navarro](https://vsapartners.com/about/ariadna-navarro) has served for four years as VSA’s Chief Strategy Officer and will expand her role to take on the Chief Growth Officer position. VSA Partners’ three new partners include [Mike Walsh](https://vsapartners.com/about/mike-walsh), Head of Client Engagement; [Kristin Lingren](https://vsapartners.com/about/kristin-lingren), General Counsel and Secretary; and [Thom Wolfe](https://vsapartners.com/about/thom-wolfe), Head of Design. 

The announcement of our recent promotions and partner additions signals a new era for VSA. As the firm nears our 40th anniversary, the timely transition to the next iteration of firm leadership is emblematic of our future-focused mindset, and seeks to further empower the core team of next-generation executives who have driven the success and reputation of VSA.

The tenure and loyalty exhibited by the recent promotions is also indicative of VSA Partners’ strong culture of great people and great work, with many recently promoted employees having decades of award-winning experience.

“It’s less a passing of the torch and more an acknowledgement that the torch has already been passed,” says Arnett. “This leadership team has always guided and inspired our associates while elevating the businesses we touch. These promotions underscore their character as leaders and it further confirms we’re heading in the right direction.”

Arnett’s successor as Chief Executive Officer, Anne-Marie Rosser, has deep ties with VSA that span over two decades. During her tenure, she has served in multiple positions, including Associate Partner of Strategy, Head of Client Engagement, and President. This depth of experience across the different disciplines at VSA makes Rosser especially adept at both steering the high-level strategic vision and ensuring its day-to-day implementation. 

“I don’t think it’s possible to have chosen a more worthy successor than Anne-Marie,” says Arnett. “No one knows our business as definitively as she does. And I think it’s fair to say we would never have gained the recent momentum and success we have without her expertise and leadership.”

For her part, Rosser spreads the credit for their successes to her entire team. “I’ve never worked with a group of people more dedicated to their jobs. From strategy to creative to account management, this team brings their best day in and day out.” 

Rosser also credits the invaluable leadership of Arnett. “Dana is and always will be the heart and soul of VSA. His passion and empathy have created a culture that cares deeply about the people they work with—colleagues, clients and the people who interact with the brands we build. I am deeply honored to be following such a legacy.”

The firm’s new Chief Growth Officer, Ariadna Navarro, joined VSA in 2018 after heading up strategy at Interbrand. Her expanded role will combine her strategic expertise with her passion for finding unique business opportunities for clients ranging from IBM to AT&T. 

“Ari is one of the most passionately curious people I know. I’ve seen her dive deep into everything from building an ethical metaverse to the ins and outs of cryptocurrency. She’s a fantastic problem solver and will be an asset to our clients by positioning VSA to best serve the next generation of brands,” says Rosser. 

The three new partners all bear deep legacies at VSA. 

Thom Wolfe, Head of Design, has been with VSA for over 20 years. He has long been a counterpart to Curt Schreiber, VSA’s Chief Creative Officer. 

“Thom is one of the most thoughtful designers and leaders I have met in my career,” says Schreiber. “And he’s constantly adapting his craft to what our clients need. He finds the way design can make something better, no matter what the medium.” 

Kristin Lingren, previously Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary, has been with VSA Partners for 14 years—during which she has built the legal practice to its current invaluable role in the day-to-day business. 

“Kristin’s reputation precedes her—she is well-known in our organization for her ethics and role as a trusted advisor to the firm’s leadership,” said Rosser. “She has been invaluable in bolstering the stability and responsibility of our firm, and I am deeply grateful to have her as a colleague.”

Mike Walsh has led engagements for many of VSA’s marquee clients since joining the firm 15 years ago. He will now take on an expanded role in the client engagement practice as partner. During his tenure at VSA, Walsh has been instrumental in growing the firm’s business through economic cycles via his consistent pursuit of uncompromising quality. 

“Anyone who knows Mike knows what an incredible team member he is,” Rosser says. “Mike is an exceptional leader and has one of the quickest wits I’ve ever encountered. He’s relentlessly focused on the human behind our clients’ business problems—it keeps his work grounded in empathy and relatability, and has been a really powerful force at VSA.” 

Congratulations to all the new partners and executives moving into their expanded roles! VSA Partners is deeply grateful for the years of dedication showcased by this group, and very excited for the next 40 years of building the VSA legacy. 


VSA Partners Elevates Six Executives, Names Three New Partners

Six-headshot grid featuring Thom Wolfe, Anne-Marie Rosser, Kristin Lingren, Dana Arnett, Mike Walsh and Ariadna Navarro

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Matt Ganser

Former Creative Director, Design

For starters, brand playbooks are not brand guidelines; we should get that established before we get too far into this. They aren’t the evergreen principles or the fundamental expression assets defined in the brand guidelines, and they aren’t the strategic guidance that informs all brand experiences. They aren’t meant to be referenced by all employees as traditional guidelines are intended. In fact, great care is taken to ensure the use of playbooks is limited to specific practitioners, often on confidential terms. 

Brands need [effective guidelines](https://vsapartners.com/news-ideas/how-to-create-brand-guidelines-people-will-use) before creating playbooks. There can be guidelines without playbooks, but it’s impossible to have playbooks without brand guidelines. It’s the “only one sun, but many planets” approach. 


Brand playbooks allow brands to be united while creating distinction for multiple initiatives. Each initiative shares a common bond through its fundamental connection to the brand guidelines but provides an individualized approach, enabling them to achieve their unique objectives. 

There can be playbooks for every facet of your brand expression, or they can be combined to create campaign playbooks involving multiple expression elements. More instructional than definitional, each play details the roles of each brand player and how to use expression assets correctly. Playbooks effectively run plays across multiple teams and disciplines for brands, removing variability and ensuring your strategy performs as intended. Playbooks also enable brand guidelines to stay flexible and encourage innovation, because they provide the structure and game plan when more precise operations are required.

An effective analogy can be found in automotive design. Audi has a defined design language and principles that effortlessly communicate the Audi experience, which we’ll refer to as the brand guidelines in this example. They’re how you know you’re looking at one of its cars from any angle, even without seeing a logo. Now, think about all the different models Audi produces, each for different audiences serving different purposes. The various “models” in our analogy are brand playbooks. It’s how Audi customizes its approach between performance sedans and economy SUVs while retaining one unified brand.

Or think of Google and its famously minimal brand guidelines philosophy, where building from white and using four colors, limited typographic choices, and illustration defines the brand expression. Now think about the multitudes of internal Google initiatives, brand partnerships and marketing campaigns across a nearly unlimited collection of technologies and products. It would be gridlock to ask for just one set of expression tools to define an endless number of marketing programs, and that’s where playbooks become integral to a brand’s success. Every Google marketing initiative is united through a shared connection to its brand guidelines but becomes uniquely impactful because of how it creates and applies brand playbooks. 

Despite all the excellent use cases for them, brand playbooks should never aspire to replace brand guidelines. If your brand is creating rules in its playbooks that contradict guidance found in your brand guidelines, it’s time to replace or update your brand guidelines.


Here are a few questions to ask when investigating if a brand playbook is right for your next project: Has something changed in your industry and you need a rapid response not included in your brand guidelines? Does it require ever-increasing effort to create your marketing, but the return on investment isn’t worth it? Are your practitioners and partner agencies creating wildly different and disjointed outputs? Are the product owners in your organization frustrated by strict brand rules that limit their ability to promote the unique attributes of their products? Or maybe you’re asking brand architecture to solve problems that brand expression enhancement could answer instead?

If any of these sounds familiar, brand playbooks can help dig your team out of “stuck and overwhelmed” and turn it into a well-oiled machine.


The best brand playbooks have beginnings rooted in awareness of circumstance and audience. 

Circumstance: Identify what duties you’re asking your brand to perform, as well as the circumstances and where they fall short. This gap is the entry point for your brand playbook. 

Audience: From there, you focus on the people requesting and creating brand assets. You talk to them and discover how you can help them accomplish what they need to do better, more efficiently, with the highest level of fidelity. You craft your guidance to match their needs, ensuring everyone who creates in your brand’s voice is invested in its success and values their role in creating work they are proud of within the structure of a playbook. 

And then you get started. It’s important to note that brand playbooks created in a tight-knit, focused group tend to have the best impact. That’s because brand playbooks are often created in response to market forces or sudden opportunities where a swift brand pivot is essential and time is a primary concern. We find it’s vital to work quickly, with small teams identifying unique approaches in collaboration with the brand decision-makers entrusted to approve work.

VSA Partners has worked with countless clients to create quick-turn, responsive brand playbooks that help them react to market changes, new product offerings and countless other circumstances that require a more precise approach than their brand guidelines currently offer. Got an idea? [Let’s talk](https://www.vsapartners.com/contact).


Break the Brand: The Case for Brand Playbooks 

Illustration of a double-page spread: on the left is a lighthouse, a woman,a n eye, a flower, and a bar chart; on the right are a masked person, a color palette, steps and a blue doorway.

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VSA’s Dana Arnett and dreams • design + life CCO Kevin Bethune sat down with graphic props designer Annie Atkins on their podcast, “The Design of Business | The Business of Design.” Annie has designed the graphic props for Wes Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and “The French Dispatch,” among other award-winning shows and movies. She also recently published “Fake Love Letters, Forged Telegrams, and Prison Escape Maps: Designing Graphic Props for Filmmaking.” 
 
Annie, Dana, and Kevin dove deep into the world of filmmaking and how the industry offered Annie a welcome alternative to the advertising and marketing path graphic designers so often take. 
 
Annie also shares how she centers herself in the time period she is designing for by studying the mundane, everyday objects of the era—bottle labels, cigarette packages and old signage. 
 
“I’m sometimes asked who my favorite designers are, and it’s hard to answer because I think a lot of the design that I love was just made by people whose names haven’t been remembered. You know, it’s just the jobbing designers, the people up the ladders, the people in the print shops,” said Annie. 
 
Annie also shared insights into the highs and lows of the job, and the unique rewards of getting to break free of the computer screen and create real objects by hand. The trio also discussed the pressure and responsibility she feels for getting the story right, and how to move forward when she gets it wrong: 
 
“I mean, it’s a high-pressure environment, so everybody’s constantly making mistakes, right? And I think it’s OK as long as you quickly throw your hands up and go, ‘OK, my mistake. How do we fix it?’ When I first started out, I think my instinct was to just, like, cover it up, you know, or point the finger, blame somebody else. I’m always telling my students, ‘Don’t blame anybody else, OK? If something goes wrong, just own up to it.’”
 
“The Design of Business | The Business of Design” is a podcast from Design Observer, now in its 10th season. Dana Arnett and Kevin Bethune co-host the show, exploring how design works within complex organizations to shape decisions and processes, drive innovation, evolve products and services, and more. 
 
[Click here to listen to the episode](https://designobserver.com/feature/s10e5--annie_atkins/40563) and learn more about this Design Observer podcast. 

Dana Arnett and Kevin Bethune Interview Annie Atkins

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Maggie Ward

Director of Marketing Communications

Healthcare has been on a bull run. 

For decades, Americans have been shelling out an ever-increasing amount for their health. In 1960, Americans spent 5% of the GDP on healthcare. In 2020, national health expenditures grew 9.7%, to $4.1 trillion, or $12,530 per person, and accounted for 19.7% of gross domestic product ([CMS](https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/NationalHealthExpendData/NHE-Fact-Sheet)). If this trend continues, healthcare spending will make up 26% of GDP—$12 trillion—by 2040 ([Deloitte](https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/health-care/future-health-care-spending.html)). A quarter of total U.S. revenue, spent on healthcare. 

But most likely, it won’t. 

Besides the obvious unsustainability of this momentum, a number of disruptive factors are taking aim at the healthcare space. Improvements in efficiencies strive to reduce waste and to introduce pricing transparency and cost-cap regulations to reduce bloat (including the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act). New competition from retailers threatens current monopolies—though, perhaps, by creating their own. And the general progress of medicine toward better outcomes seeks to reduce chronic and emergency needs in favor of preventative care. 

The impact of all these compounding factors is reduced prices. Which is life-changing news for consumers. But for businesses and their employees, it also means reduced revenues. 

A Deloitte study found that by 2040, health spending will hold about steady at 18.4% of the GDP, which, at $8.3 trillion, is a revenue gap to the tune of $3.7 trillion. And within this spending, the breakdown looks very different from today’s healthcare system: a 35% reduction in inpatient revenue and a 44% reduction in demand for hospital beds by 2030.

Instead, money will shift elsewhere—from 80% of health spending directed toward care and treatment to 60% of health spending directed toward improving well-being by 2040 ([Deloitte](https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/health-care/future-health-care-spending.html)). That means that instead of focusing on emergency procedures and treating diseases, care will instead shift to a holistic and preventative model, which could encompass factors far beyond physical or mental ailments like financial health or community support. This is a significant shift from the status quo and represents a tidal wave of change for healthcare products. 

With money drying up in care and treatment, businesses are looking at new models—and revenue streams—in the health and whole-person wellness space to remain competitive. 

And in the rapidly unfolding future, they’ll have company. The consistent expansion of retail health competitors like Amazon and Walmart will slice into the market with competitive pricing and serve as an alternative to more traditional healthcare establishments. [Gartner predicts](https://emtemp.gcom.cloud/ngw/globalassets/en/doc/documents/757896-predicts-2022-connections-drive-healthcare-and-life-science-business-model-change.pdf) that “by 2025, 10 major employers will disintermediate payers’ provider networks by contracting directly with a major retailer to deliver low-acuity care, chronic disease management and ancillary health and wellness services to employees.” 


We’ve identified the current trends and trend drivers that will change why and how companies show up in the marketplace. This includes promising investments for the healthcare brands of tomorrow, including those that specialize in wearables, hospitals at home, telehealth, AI and data sharing, and their reason for being: consumer empowerment and ecosystem models. 

We then considered what obstacles will arise from these developments, and how companies can maintain their edge and get ahead of the challenges of tomorrow in order to establish themselves as emergent leaders. **We ascertained that building trust to drive choice will play a considerable role in market differentiation amid these hurdles.**

After all, technology is the great equalizer, not the differentiator. 

 
The healthcare system has been disappointing to U.S. patients and medical professionals alike for a very long time. America spends an exorbitant amount on healthcare compared with other developed countries, yet our life expectancy falls short of those with smaller spends ([Our World in Data](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-health-expenditure)). Our health is more expensive, and yet poorer, than the rest of the developed world.
 
In just the past few years, the satisfaction score for U.S. hospitals slid from [76 in 2018](https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/hospitals-health-systems/survey-consumer-satisfaction-hospitals-takes-a-dip-while-payer-score) to [69 in 2021](https://www.theacsi.org/industries/health-care/). This puts the satisfaction score for hospitals lower than that for audiences surveyed about their satisfaction with the IRS, which [came in at 71](https://www.theacsi.org/industries/government/).
 
Introducing the new, empowered healthcare consumer. Disappointed in the systems that deliver care, patients have sought more autonomy and control of their healthcare and health decisions.
 
The healthcare consumers of tomorrow are already equipped with growing information about their health. A [Deloitte study](https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/risk/us-the-power-of-network-edecosystems-new.pdf) showed that 76% of U.S. consumers have gone online to learn about health and care, 64% searched for provider reviews online and almost 50% tracked health metrics like blood sugar levels. 
 
But beyond research and information, healthcare consumers are actively seeking out alternative or complementary treatments—measured by the ballooning wellness industry, which is predicted to reach nearly $7 trillion by 2025 at a 9.9% average annual growth rate ([Global Wellness Institute](https://globalwellnessinstitute.org/press-room/statistics-and-facts/)). This is a huge opportunity for the healthcare industry to meet consumers’ needs by providing them with a holistic, well-rounded wellness experience.

Cutting-edge technologies are incredibly important. Yet the brightest future of healthcare lies not in its tools, but in better deployment of those tools.
 
In the past, industry titans relied on one of two strategies for growth: horizontal integration (acquiring or merging with companies that conduct business within the same plane of a product’s supply chain) or vertical integration (acquiring or merging with companies that conduct business throughout a product’s supply chain).
 
Tech companies upended industry as we know it by establishing a third strategy: functional integration, which places customers in the center of an ecosystem and uses their business to position products and services around the user.
 
But the control over limitless product types was only part of the model’s success—the real gold was in data. Companies had access to insights on consumer behavior and preferences like never before, and that data was then leveraged to provide hyper-relevant products, services and communication. This model creates a continuous value exchange, retaining the customer and creating a better consumer experience.
 
As the healthcare industry faces rapidly changing consumer demands—access to telehealth, hospital-at-home services, greater efficiencies at the digital front door—healthcare companies may be tempted to merge and acquire their way into capabilities better suited to this new landscape. But to really play and succeed, they will likely find more success in functional integration models.
 
That’s because M&A activity takes significant investment, in both resources and time, and creates behemoth organizations that sometimes struggle to pivot in the face of challengers. Functional integration, on the other hand, takes the onus off the healthcare company to provide end-to-end services within its wall (and all the talent, equipment and real estate that requires), and instead allows it to become the switchboard seamlessly connecting its customers with the right provider or products at the right time.
 
It can also speak to the empowered consumer. As mentioned above, healthcare consumers are seeking wellness-oriented care that can complement their medical treatments. A platform approach can lock customers into an ecosystem that provides everything from pharmaceuticals to meditation apps. Brands that adopt an ecosystem model support the network effect by unifying numerous products and services under a single idea so customers view interactions with companies as one holistic, beneficial and problem-solving experience, instead of the disjointed care we have today.
 
Retailers and tech companies are already starting, encroaching on a space that was once held solely by healthcare companies. Amazon, Walmart and even TikTok owner ByteDance are all making big moves into the healthcare space, with more joining every day. As we write this, CVS is making huge waves with its $8 billion acquisition of Signify Health. And retailers will have an advantage because of their existing ability to deliver a wide range of products to patients, both digitally and physically.

If empowerment and ecosystems are the societal and industry trends that make change attractive, then technologies are the trend drivers that make change possible. Here we examine these trend drivers and the characteristics their providers will compete on.

For the empowered healthcare consumer, access to their own data is incredibly important. And they will increasingly get their data not from providers or hospitals, but from the technology on their persons and in their homes.
 
[Research and Markets predicts](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190218005190/en/Global-534.3-Billion-Internet-of-Things-IoT-in-Healthcare-Market-2018-2025-by-Component-Connectivity-Technology-Application-and-Segment-Forecasts---ResearchAndMarkets.com) that “the global internet of things (IoT) in healthcare market size is expected to reach USD 534.3 billion by 2025, expanding at a CAGR of 20.2% over the forecast period.”
 
What was once only available in-hospital can now be worn on the wrist. And this access is quickly changing how we receive information about our health. [Deloitte found](https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/blog/health-care-blog/2020/streaming-services-made-music-cheap-and-accessible-the-same-thing-could-happen-to-health-care.html) that Americans visit their physician about four times a year, and they experience 0.5 health-related micro-interactions every day—think your Apple Watch alerting you to a fast heart rate. But by 2040, it projects that “the typical American will have 77 daily health-related micro-interactions, while spending less time interacting with their doctor.”
 
The possibilities for these “wearables” and smart devices are endless: smart toothbrushes that detect genetic changes indicating disease, clothing that measures temperature and dehydration, jewelry that clocks sleep patterns, toilets that test urine for infections or pregnancy, cars that detect increased heart rate and intervene with soothers or warnings before road rage takes over.
 
And the data they will provide, both to the consumer as well as to healthcare professionals and companies, will be critical toward building both better personal and community health. It will also come with significant trust issues, but more on that later.

Technology enables healthcare to happen anywhere. And in particular, in the home.
 
The model of hospital at home has a significant benefit to the patient, including control over the environment, lower costs and reduced risk of nosocomial infections. These benefits are already causing movement, with [Gartner predicting](https://emtemp.gcom.cloud/ngw/globalassets/en/doc/documents/757896-predicts-2022-connections-drive-healthcare-and-life-science-business-model-change.pdf) that “by 2025, 40% of healthcare providers will shift 20% of hospital beds to the patient’s home through digitally enabled hospital-at-home services, improving patient experience and outcomes and reducing the cost of care,” and [Grand View Research predicting](https://www.bloomberg.com/press-releases/2022-07-07/home-healthcare-market-to-be-worth-634-9-billion-by-2030-grand-view-research-inc) that the home healthcare market will be worth $634.9 billion by 2030.
 
Consumers are also embracing virtual care. [McKinsey reports](https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/healthcare-systems-and-services/our-insights/telehealth-a-quarter-trillion-dollar-post-covid-19-reality) that telehealth has stabilized at 38 times its pre-pandemic levels, and that the number of virtual-first health plans grew from only one in 2019 to at least eight in 2020. The lower cost and convenience doesn’t take away from consumer satisfaction—[Accenture reports](https://www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/PDF-171/Accenture-Global-Exec-Summary-Final.pdf#zoom=40) that “virtual experiences create very nearly as much positive emotion as in-person consultations, and patients would use digital technology for a number of important interactions with healthcare organizations.”
 
The future where healthcare can be delivered remotely is almost here, and AI adoption plays a critical role in delivering these personalized, decentralized experiences. But we would say AI’s main target is inefficiency for both providers and patients alike.
 
And it’s an industry that could use more efficiency—according to an academic paper from Humana Inc., about 25% of healthcare spending can be categorized as waste ([*JAMA*](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2752664)).
 
For providers, AI can streamline everything from diagnostics and the coordination of care to scheduling and staff rotations. And for patients, it enables a personalized, seamless experience throughout care and treatment. Which is important—an [Accenture study](https://www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/PDF-171/Accenture-Global-Exec-Summary-Final.pdf#zoom=40) attributes the most frequent source of bad experiences to inefficient visits to medical providers. [Deloitte predicts](https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/finance/future-of-cyber-in-the-future-of-health.pdf) that by 2023, 20% of all patient interactions will involve some form of AI in either clinical or nonclinical applications, up from 4% in 2020.
 
The breakthrough technology around accessibility and efficiency will provide more people with the healthcare they desperately need, with lower costs for operators because of the decreased need for real estate. With savings in both operating costs and efficiencies, and better offerings to consumers, these advancements will have a significant impact on how people access care.

Healthcare companies that are ready to embrace these new technologies speak to the empowered customer and dive into a functional integration model face numerous infrastructural challenges. But many of them boil down to the pursuit of the gold standard of brand and consumer relations: trust.
 
Trust is a critical component of strong brands. Trust in the product; trust in the provider of the product; and trust that when something goes wrong, the provider will fix it.
 
When it comes to trust and the future of healthcare, trust in data and data protection will be paramount for the brands looking to stand out from the crowd and create a competitive edge.
 
There’s a lot of room for growth.
 
The public perception of data security in healthcare is tepid at best. An [Accenture study](https://www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/PDF-171/Accenture-Global-Exec-Summary-Final.pdf#zoom=40) found that 41% of people “very much” trusted healthcare providers to safeguard their data, 39% “a little.” The results were even worse for tech companies, which received a 10% “very much” and 31% “a little” rating.
 
Perception aside, the public drive is there to finally create better data sharing. Moving between different EHR systems has long been challenging for patients and providers alike, with EHR companies highly disincentivized to offer collaboration. A [study from the Pew Charitable Trusts](https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/2021/07/most-americans-want-to-share-and-access-more-digital-health-data) found that “a clear majority of respondents—81%—said different providers should be able to share health data about patients they have in common.” In addition, “more than 2 in 3 want their various clinicians to exchange specific information in health records—such as advanced care plans or end-of-life preferences, images, and family medical histories—that federal data-sharing policies don’t currently require.”
 
And in a big win for personalization, [the study found](https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/2021/07/most-americans-want-to-share-and-access-more-digital-health-data) that “by a roughly 2-to-1 margin, respondents were comfortable with their health providers scanning patient fingerprints or assigning individuals a unique number or code to ensure that different EHR systems correctly match records for the same person, a long-standing challenge of data exchange.”
 
How can healthcare brands establish the trust that will set them apart in this competitive new landscape? First off, healthcare companies need to invest in the security technologies that will enable them to protect patient data and work with third-party companies to create a better patient experience without endangering data safety. 
 
But it’s not enough to build the infrastructure anymore—successful brands need to convey a feeling of trust and credibility to these newly empowered customers.
 
Although the infrastructure needs to support a rebuttal to these challenges, public perception will be managed by good branding. The following sections outline the three considerations for building a trustworthy brand in the healthcare space.

When it comes to communicating care and trust, how a brand shows up can do some seriously heavy lifting. Think of tech companies, and how even a behemoth like Google feels fun and approachable. Tapping into the success that tech companies have had even as they accumulate an enormous amount of data can yield important lessons to healthcare companies hoping to do the same.
 
One of the biggest challenges for healthcare companies adopting an ecosystem model—either as the controller of the ecosystem or as a niche provider of excellent services within it—is how to communicate that care and trust across a wide array of partners.
 
Whenever you stitch together a series of collectives, it can be difficult to smooth out the edges into a seamless user experience. As companies look to adopt an ecosystem model to better serve their empowered customers and grab a larger share of the marketplace, many will likely struggle with the number of partners that might be working in tandem at any given time in said ecosystem. Partnering with best-of-breed services provides the most cutting-edge, innovative health-and-wellness experiences, but it also requires stitching together not only technologies but also cultures, delivery mechanisms and brand experience.
 
The overlap of the companies and their roles will need to be carefully orchestrated and defined to create consistency, not confusion. Are all companies equally visible? If not, what is the hierarchy? How do you communicate the value proposition of each, and how does this fit into the larger ecosystem?
 
Answering these questions, strategizing the approach, ensuring all members are on the same page, and building in the branding and marketing strategy to pull it all off will be the most difficult challenges healthcare companies face—but they will also set the stage for success when it comes to a coordinated brand that consumers can trust throughout their experience with multiple providers.

AI has the power to do much more than replace physical encounters with digital ones. And the customer journey through a healthcare platform should include surprise and delight at the seamlessness, personalization and speed.
 
This begins with a wide digital front door.
 
To attract and retain the newly empowered healthcare consumer, healthcare companies need to think more like a D2C company. This mindset starts with casting a wide net to attract new users on digital platforms. First, easy-to-find, relevant content about a company’s market differentiation should be quickly accessible and delivered to its target audiences at the right time. Advertising, search, website, mobile app—all require consistent branding and messaging that speaks to the consumer’s needs at the precise moment they need it.
 
Perhaps a patient searches for their symptoms and lands on a page that connects them with a chatbot. From there, they are directed to the right telehealth doctor, who can then prescribe them medication that is delivered to their door within a few hours.
 
All of these experiences increase the likelihood that a potential customer will not only continue their journey through purchase, but will also recommend and use a service in the future.

Throughout the transition to consumer trust building, it’s essential that employees and stakeholders be included, consulted and cared for to receive essential input from personnel on the ground and ensure that the brand carries a sense of ownership to the people who will be its face every day. In the case of healthcare providers, it could be the way for companies to establish trust with their consumers.
 
In fact, a recent study shows that providers may hold the key to helping companies establish the consumer trust they’re looking for. [The Pew Charitable Trusts](https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/2021/07/most-americans-want-to-share-and-access-more-digital-health-data) found that 76% of survey participants were comfortable with apps that were pre-approved by their providers, while 61% were comfortable with apps pre-approved by an independent certification board. This statistic signals that provider buy-in will be critical to mass adoption of new app technologies, and that there is a white space ready for a trusted, accredited institution to become the certifier of trustworthy apps.
 
But *getting* top talent to build that patient rapport will likely mean a *war* for talent. The COVID-19 pandemic has been devastating for hospital morale. More than one-third of nurses plan to quit their jobs in 2022, with 32% planning to retire or leave the field and 40% planning to get a job in nursing somewhere else ([HealthLeaders](https://www.healthleadersmedia.com/nursing/one-third-nurses-plan-quit-their-jobs-2022-thanks-high-stress-and-burnout)). And burnout remains high across the board, with 52% of respondents in a recent study reporting “a great deal” of stress, and under 50% of providers reporting that they feel valued by their organization ([American Medical Association](https://www.ama-assn.org/practice-management/physician-health/burnout-benchmark-28-unhappy-current-health-care-job)).
 
Investing in healthcare providers and offering the support and technology they need to improve efficiencies and outcomes can greatly reduce this turnover. Another study shows that individuals who feel valued by their organization have an almost 60% reduction in experiencing burnout, as well as likelihood to leave their current position ([American Medical Association](https://www.ama-assn.org/practice-management/physician-health/burnout-benchmark-28-unhappy-current-health-care-job)). New York University Stern School marketing professor Scott Galloway noted in a recent piece that “physicians spend just 27% of their time helping patients—49% is spent dealing with electronic health records. That includes documentation, order entry, billing, and inbox management. In other words, you spend a decade going to school to get an M.D., only to become a bureaucrat” ([“No Mercy / No Malice”](https://www.profgalloway.com/prime-health/)). Investing in workflow efficiencies and AI technologies that can help providers spend less time on paperwork and more time with patients, and working with them to build a lived brand experience, will in turn result in better healthcare for consumers and continue to improve trust in healthcare brands.

We believe the healthcare industry is poised to change for the better. By empowering consumers with their health data and creating better, more cohesive health-and-wellness experiences, these changes may finally create a healthcare system that is built like the human body it treats: holistic and interconnected.
 
But the question of which companies will be there when it’s done will be determined by their willingness to adapt and invest in their brand during a period of expanded consumer choice—and to build a better future for the empowered healthcare consumer.

*Contributors: Amyri Williams, Jeff Walker, Jerry Stiedaman, Mike Walsh. 
Editor: Maria Erdmann. 
Illustrator: Cody Fenske.*

Building the Strong Healthcare Brands of Tomorrow 

Blue-and-white collage illustration alluding to healthcare market. A woman rests her hand against her cheek in a thoughtful expression, while bubbles featuring healthcare graphs, hospitals, and a heart with hands around it float around her head.

future_of_health_web

VSA CEO Dana Arnett and dreams • design + life CCO Kevin Bethune recently interviewed writer and editor Perrin Drumm, the head of publishing at the book imprint for indie film distribution and production company A24.
 
Drumm discusses her journey from the corporate world of Condé Nast into an organization-defining role at AIGA, working on Eye on Design, and most recently into her current home at A24. Drumm’s inspiration—and her success—comes from finding unlikely sources. 
 
“Inspiration is everywhere,” Drumm says. “You don’t necessarily need to just follow design inspo feeds. People want actual stories, and they want to hear from people. And it’s really refreshing.” 
 
“The Design of Business | The Business of Design” is a podcast from Design Observer, now in its 10th season. Dana Arnett and Kevin Bethune co-host the show, exploring how design works within complex organizations to shape decisions and processes, drive innovation, evolve products and services, and more. 
 
[Click here to listen to the episode](https://designobserver.com/article.php?id=40562) and learn more about this Design Observer podcast. 
 


Dana Arnett and Kevin Bethune Interview Perrin Drumm

Perrin_Drum_new


VSA CEO Dana Arnett and dreams • design + life CCO Kevin Bethune recently interviewed Vernon Lockhart, the executive director of Chicago-based design education and mentoring initiative Project Osmosis. Lockhart also serves as an adjunct instructor at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Design, and is the founder and principal of Art on the Loose, a creative consulting firm specializing in exhibition design and brand identity.
 
In this episode, Lockhart speaks to both metamorphosis and mentorship. Lockhart delves into the origins of Project Osmosis and how its building blocks might inform the future of design. It all began with an invitation. 
 
“I learned quickly that the biggest reason why people aren’t exposed to something is because they never received an invitation,” he says. 
 
Here’s more from Lockhart on breaking down barriers to design: “We all have the human right to be creative—I truly believe that we all do. And it shouldn’t be based on finance, or borders, or boundaries. You know that those things need to be removed and we need to do it in a way where we not only just break them down, but make sure that they can’t be rebuilt.” 
 
“The Design of Business | The Business of Design” is a podcast from Design Observer, now in its 10th season. Dana Arnett and Kevin Bethune co-host the show, exploring how design works within complex organizations to shape decisions and processes, drive innovation, evolve products and services, and more. 
 
[Click here to listen to the episode](lhttps://designobserver.com/article.php?id=40556) and learn more about this Design Observer podcast. 

Dana Arnett and Kevin Bethune Interview Vernon Lockhart

VernonLockhart_563x315_new

VSA CEO Dana Arnett and dreams • design + life CCO Kevin Bethune recently interviewed Jane Saks, the president and artistic director of Project&. She is also the co-founder and co-artistic director of M2M: Monuments to Movements. 
 
In this episode, Saks shares the origin stories behind the many projects that make up her “collaged life,” how she redesigns traditional spaces to be inclusive and expansive, and how she engages a variety of artists, architects, designers and writers to take on some of the biggest social justice challenges of our time. 
 
Here’s a quote from Saks during their chat, on the complementary roles of art and design, and the role of art as “a second respondent”:
 
“When you need blood and sandbags and shelter and food, you don’t call it an art, right? It’s not the first to get there at the fire. Now, it can soothe a baby who’s crying—I’m not saying it isn’t often a first responder, but it’s really a second respondent. And that’s where the idea of design and architecture and art and culture really come together. As a second respondent, we get to be reflective. We get to risk, we get to be courageous, make mistakes. We can’t make mistakes as a first responder, right? And so that’s where the properties of these fields really kind of overlap. So if you have a chance to rethink building shelter, what does that look like? What does that feel like? How does it make people feel? And so as a second respondent, you can question. And it also means that you can commit to getting deeper and deeper into the problem. That’s what art and culture does. It’s what design is and it’s what architecture does.”
 
“The Design of Business | The Business of Design” is a podcast from Design Observer, now in its 10th season. Dana Arnett and Kevin Bethune co-host the show, exploring how design works within complex organizations to shape decisions and processes, drive innovation, evolve products and services, and more. 
 
[Click here](https://designobserver.com/article.php?id=40553) to listen to the episode and learn more about this Design Observer podcast. 

Dana Arnett and Kevin Bethune Interview Jane Saks

Depending on whom you talk to, brand guidelines can be considered either indispensable or completely invisible. For some brands, guidelines are a lighthouse, transmitting a reliable signal and uniting brand creators through the fog of uncertainty. For others, guidelines are an unused and unseen formality, considered a restrictive tool that inhibits creativity. 

But putting aside the emotions they evoke, what brand guidelines are is simple: a set of rules and standards that create a cohesive brand appearance across channels. From typography, imagery and tone of voice to countless other expression decisions, brand guidelines provide a single source of truth to communicate the brand strategy. 

We consistently find a direct connection between high-achieving brands and thoughtfully constructed brand guidance. And brand guidance has only increased in importance over the past few decades. Considering the rapid acceleration of modern marketing channels, more is being asked of brands than ever before. Even once-sleepy B2B categories now force brands to compete in a world where coordinated performance across social media, digital, earned and paid media is no longer voluntary. And competing in this new reality forces brands to consider every aspect of their brand execution by transforming their brand guidance from invisible to indispensable. 

How to get there? We rely on three principles when creating brand guidelines for our clients: intended audience knowledge, dynamic interfaces, and consistent brand training. Together, these considerations build brand guidelines that will not only be used, but will also be supremely useful toward creating cohesive brand experiences, building brand awareness and ultimately driving revenue and growth for our clients. 

The world of brand execution is rapidly evolving—and with it, there’s exponential growth in both the quantity of content required and the number of roles necessary to create it. For example, what was once simply referred to as “digital design” has blossomed to include multiple disciplines of creators, from animators to influencers to media buyers—each with a distinct responsibility for brand output. 

Branding has expanded beyond the output of what traditional designers and writers can achieve, and brand guidelines must evolve to value the unique needs of these new creators.

Without brand guidelines, chaos ensues. But with too tight a grip, the innovation and flexibility required by these fast-paced digital platforms is stifled by a cage of brand requirements. Choosing the right level for your company begins with recognizing that different types of creators and users require different levels of exactitude—and building your brand guidelines to reflect their needs. 

The best-designed brands will fail if the people executing the brand are unable to successfully deliver the intent of the brand guidelines. Indeed, it’s common for brands to have talented creatives at the ready without the infrastructure that would allow them to succeed. Whatever the talent level available, brands must be realistic in assessing the skill and commitment required to implement their brand systems, and it starts by identifying each brand’s unique priorities. A direct-to-consumer brand will prioritize brand guidance principles differently than a business-to-business brand, and the rules will vary for each group of practitioners.

When creating brand systems, we’re consistently thinking about the user experience of the people who will ultimately build the brands we’ve designed. The final assembly of brand guidance is for us a culmination of the insights and decisions that guided us from the very start of the project. 

Consider how a pioneering DTC brand like Warby Parker continuously uses a brand expression on the cutting edge of trends by prioritizing design aesthetics. It’s a delicate balance for Warby Parker to stay culturally current while building brand equity. Striking that balance requires a collection of uniquely talented practitioners to create nuanced branded experiences. Brands in this scenario recognize the freedom their practitioners need and prioritize brand principles over prescriptive brand rules. Generally speaking, the more advanced and specialized the makeup of your creative team, the more appropriate these flexible brand principles become.

A different scenario is common for B2B brands, where brand consistency and systems thinking is prioritized. This approach also requires a collection of talented practitioners, but this group is skilled in different ways. They’re able to unite disconnected executions, creating consistent branded experiences. Doing this requires the brand to provide definition, structure and clearly defined rules. A positive byproduct of this structure means brands in this scenario can work with a broader selection of practitioners, because general skills are best suited to accomplish the brand’s goals. Accordingly, when creating guidelines for this scenario, brands must recognize that they are simultaneously speaking to multiple skill levels and craft their guidance to match that reality.
 
It’s simply not enough for us to just design a beautiful brand. Brand guidelines must match the executional realities of the practitioners who will execute the brand every day, and support them with both the appropriate amount of structure and flexibility. 

In a rapidly fading past life, brand guidelines were delivered via PDF. Today, the best brand guidelines are digital—and dynamic. The PDF guidelines of the past created significant challenges for the users, specifically the density and lack of clarity in the guidance found in PDF due to their extended length. Add in small text sizes and missing navigation functionality, and interfacing with PDF guidelines often felt like taking an AP test when you’ve only taken the regular class for the semester. Secondarily, once a PDF of the guidelines is created, it immediately becomes nearly impossible to update. The guidelines become a frozen monument to a moment in time, making ongoing brand updates all the more challenging to implement. 

Digital solutions solve these problems. The fundamental relationship between curated guidance and website hierarchy forces a distillation of information that prioritizes clarity. And the dynamic nature means updates are easy and immediate. The ability to push updates to audiences while providing instantaneous access to assets allows brand guidelines to move at the speed of the digital world—evolving with the users, not holding them back.

We believe every employee plays a role in the successful representation of a brand’s strategy. Even the employees you wouldn’t normally consider integral to delivering brand messaging are routinely in a position to communicate on behalf of the brand, and each of those moments needs to align with the brand strategy for a modern brand to thrive. From those unexpected brand ambassadors through traditional brand creatives, every person who interacts with the brand should receive initial brand training followed by update sessions at regular intervals. For corporations, training on the brand guidelines should be as commonplace as security training.

Building on a baseline of brand training, customized training can then be deployed for creators where more specialized knowledge is required to produce nuanced aspects of brand expression. And for advanced creators, brand playbooks are a useful tool to communicate how to implement modified campaign expressions for niche audiences. (We’ll cover more about brand playbooks in [part two](https://vsapartners.com/news-ideas/the-case-for-brand-playbooks).) 

A quick Google search will highlight many off-the-shelf brand training approaches, but in our view, brand training needs to be every bit as unique as the brands they represent. Both the subjects communicated and the method for delivering the guidance need to be appropriate for the expectations and personality of the individual brands. 


The brands that succeed in today’s fast-paced marketing ecosystem create thoughtfully considered digital brand guidelines that keep the audience in mind—and then train their creators with customized, flexible brand education. 

VSA Partners is dedicated to creating better human experiences for our brand partners, and these human experiences don’t end outside the company’s walls. By building the framework for employees and creators to consistently carry out a cohesive brand experience, brand guidelines create a powerful force for brand cohesion and awareness. From the starting line to years after implementation, the brand guidelines we build are not just built to last—they’re built to scale. 

Interested in working with us? [Let’s start a conversation](https://www.vsapartners.com/contact) to discover how we can help you more clearly communicate your brand to your brand creators.

How to Create Brand Guidelines People Will Actually Use

Illustration of a lighthouse with various fonts, colors, and symbols in its light beams.

Brand_guidelines_1_web

VSA CEO Dana Arnett recently joined dreams • design + life CCO Kevin Bethune to interview Johnson & Johnson Chief Design Officer Ernesto Quinteros on the Design Observer podcast “The Design of Business | The Business of Design” (“DBBD”). 
 
In this episode, Dana and Kevin get Ernesto’s perspective on the midcareer decisions designers struggle with, the skill sets companies look for in designers and teams, how to bring the consumer into the design process, and much more. 
 
Ernesto also shares the journey and learnings that brought him into his current role, which is deeply rooted in both his personal history and future legacy: 
 
“I realized I didn’t want to keep designing products that weren’t having a positive impact on people…. Working in healthcare was an opportunity for me to give back. Witnessing my mom’s health issues, having some experience in healthcare, I wanted my children to look at their dad and say, ‘Hey, Dad’s doing something that’s meaningful with design.’” 
 
“The Design of Business | The Business of Design” is a podcast from Design Observer, now in its 10th season. Dana Arnett and Kevin Bethune co-host the show, exploring how design works within complex organizations to shape decisions and processes, drive innovation, evolve products and services, and more. 
 
[Click here](https://designobserver.com/article.php?id=40548) to listen to the episode and learn more about this Design Observer podcast.


Dana Arnett and Kevin Bethune Interview Ernesto Quinteros

Ernesto_Quinteros_new

Very excited to share that VSA Partners was awarded the MUSE Creative Platinum Award for its work on Connections Academy’s Invite Knowledge In campaign. 

Connections Academy is a tuition-free online educator. They came to us looking to elevate their brand from the sea of sameness that typifies the marketing in their industry–in so many words, “kids in front of screens.” The goal was straightforward: Increase brand awareness, recall, and favorability.

Connections Academy’s approach to online learning brings an inspiring curriculum directly into the homes of their students and their families. Taught by educators trained specifically in online learning, they really do “bring the lessons to life.”

So for our creative approach, that’s exactly what we did. In a series of films, we encouraged viewers to “invite knowledge in” by showing historical figures (symbolizing Connections Academy’s range of academic subjects) brought to life and dropped directly into the worlds of our students. From Cleopatra and Newton on a school bus, to a centaur in the hallway, to a medieval knight removing his shoes before heading inside, we created a visual landscape that drove home our clients’ point of difference, and stepped completely outside the creative conventions of the industry.

The finished work was unlike anything else in the category, and the clients were thrilled with the elevated and highly differentiated new look this work gave to the brand. 

We’re deeply grateful for this recognition from the MUSE Creative Awards, and very proud of the team that created this impactful campaign. Check out the campaign videos below.

VSA Partners Wins MUSE Creative Platinum Award

Abraham Lincoln and Napoleon Bonaparte share an earbud on a school bus. Other historical figures sit behind them. 

hero_20220907_ConnectionsAcademy_Bus_EarbudShare_v01

VSA Partners is thrilled to announce we received a Silver award and five honorable mentions in the 2023 Graphis Design Awards program. 
 
Our work performed for Spacial, a prefab manufacturing company of accessory dwelling units (ADUs), received Silver, and our work for Udemy, FuelCell Energy, Curia, Affirm B2B and Chicago Council on Global Affairs all received honorable mentions. 
 
VSA is honored to have received these accolades from the 2023 Graphis Design Awards program, and deeply grateful to the incredible team members who made it happen. 
 
Read on below for a little more about each of the projects! 
 
**Spacial: Silver Award**
 
When Innovatus Capital Partners came to VSA, it was interested in launching an ADU business because of their sustainability and their viability as an affordable housing solution. So VSA got to work building the strategy, identity, expression, and application.
 
VSA launched a positioning strategy that owned the territory of “Space with Soul,” which connected with a desire in consumers to extend their home without losing the design details that make a space feel human.
 
For the new name, VSA landed on the the elegant, light-filled concept of “Spacial,” which nods to the efficient use of square footage, the natural light available, and possibilities this additional space unlocks. 
 
We created a typographic logo for Spacial that is approachable and straightforward, just like Spacial’s approach to housing. A color bar brings together Spacial’s new palette to represent how Spacial is used to add vibrancy to life. 
 
In addition to the brand identity work, we also created a digital presence for Spacial. Our platform work included a responsive website, social media marketing and a Salesforce-enabled lead-capture engine built to launch the brand online and drive awareness and customer engagement. In less than six months, VSA delivered over 1,000 qualified leads. 
 
**Udemy: Honorable Mention**
 
Udemy is the world’s largest online learning platform. But the brand was suffering from a transactional perception and had faded into the broad landscape of online education. VSA Partners was selected to aid Udemy in a transformation, including strategy, identity, expression and digital platform design.
 
We landed on the positioning of Udemy as empowerment. The direction seeks to elevate the many voices of Udemy to convey a community-led redefining of what education can be. 
 
Our work included a logo redesign where we embodied the idea of upward movement and breaking boundaries. We also worked with Udemy to identify purple as its primary color. Purple is the color of imagination and speaks to Udemy’s promise to inspire new possibilities and encourage growth. We selected the optimal display font for Udemy’s brand expression as Suisse Works, which gives an editorial quality that communicates trust and expertise. 
 
This complete system of storytelling equipped Udemy to transform its digital presence and ed-tech profile, and strengthened its ability to attract learners and instructors alike. Two years after VSA’s foundational work, Udemy increased its instructor base from 42,000 to 60,000 and grew its online curriculum to 175,000 courses.
 
**FuelCell Energy: Honorable Mention**
 
Although FuelCell Energy had evolved to become a leader in clean energy, its brand identity had fallen behind in effectively communicating its new core mission. VSA Partners joined FuelCell to take its renewed corporate purpose—to enable the world to live empowered by clean energy—and translate this into a communicative brand expression system. 
 
The final brand identity is full of symbolism. The design’s use of gradients signals the journey its customers take toward achieving carbon zero. The reductive footprint of the border design system reinforces how frictionless the adoption of clean energy can be. FuelCell was also equipped with a color scheme associated with lower ink toxicity that, ironically, hues like green can have. The typeface ABC Diatype was selected because of its clean yet warm appearance and its ability to reinforce the overall brand commitment to being minimal and waste-free. 
 
Lastly, the logo is a clever embodiment of the brand’s work and identity. The logo design is inspired by the movement of molecules in fuel cells. The letterforms also incorporate F, C, E and L—the letters that make up FuelCell’s stock ticker symbol. The upper-right segment of the logo also completes the “zero,” which visualizes the company’s mission of achieving zero carbon emissions. 
 
**Curia: Honorable Mention**
 
AMRI needed a new brand vision that would match its ambitious business goals, and it chose VSA to rebrand and reinvent its brand identity and expression. 
 
Our assessment found that the contract development and manufacturing (CDMO) industry was meeting table-stakes needs but falling short on customer experience. This led us to create a brand that leans into customer-centricity and values character, in addition to projecting its deep credentials in the life sciences. 
 
In just over six months, the company announced its new name, Curia, and launched its holistic new brand. The name, which connotes intellectual curiosity and means “an assembly of minds,” gave VSA an approachable direction for the design of the brand. Our brand toolkit supports this with human-centric photography, a warm but unconventional color palette for the category, and language that connects Curia’s science and scale to its ultimate purpose: better patient outcomes. Curia’s people, customers and end-patients are front and center in the brand’s expression. 
 
VSA’s partnership with Curia resulted in a strong, forward-focused brand that could communicate all the amazing capabilities of this groundbreaking company. The vibrant, thoughtful brand expression is easily able to adapt across mediums and campaigns, creating a strong foundation for Curia’s ambitious future. 
 
**Chicago Council on Global Affairs: Honorable Mention**
 
In advance of its 100th anniversary, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs sought a digital transformation that would boost brand recognition and differentiation. VSA Partners was tasked with defining this digital transformation and positioning the organization to connect with new audiences.
 
Our work elevated and energized the existing identity in preparation for the Council’s next 100 years, while also adding robust new design guidelines that spoke to the organization’s desire for transformation. In the design elements, we shifted the focus on the organization from regional to global, bringing more global colors and universal elements to the palette and typography. 
 
Our elements also coalesced to emphasize a more human focus. From the typography selected to the use of the “C” as a framing device, we put humans and human issues in the center of our design. We also nodded to the complexity of many of these issues by using a layered approach to storytelling, using shapes and transparency to demonstrate multiple perspectives. Colors were moved to include green for a more global approach, and typefaces were thoughtfully chosen to represent the Council’s brand, reflecting both its history of credibility and its open and promising future.
 
**Affirm B2B: Honorable Mention **
 
While Affirm’s B2B program had great numbers on its side, it lacked a unified point of view. VSA was tasked with moving Affirm from a tactical marketing strategy to instead unify their marketing efforts into a cohesive platform. To do so, we created an identity, messaging, branding, advertising, and a campaign platform that could be used across multiple channels to drive differentiation in the category. 
 
The central campaign platform rallied around the cry to “turn up the volume,” which emphasizes Affirm’s ability to increase conversions, customer love, and sales for businesses. This idea was carried out into the visual identity, key messaging, core assets, and a playbook for external and internal partners to work from. Throughout all the materials, we focused on infusing flexibility into our expression system, both in copy and design. The system itself is simple, but allows for a multitude of combinations and mediums. Every design element was thoughtfully crafted to symbolize growth, which builds a cohesive story while still offering a range of options to the Affirm team. This interchangeability allows for messaging, imagery and even graphics to easily be swapped in and out for each other—without losing the strong point of view. 

VSA Partners Wins Multiple Graphis Design Awards

Collage of VSA client deliverables, including posters, banners, websites, print materials, and brand expression systems.

Graphis Design Awards_Banner

VSA’s Chief Strategy Officer Ariadna Navarro was recently featured on the Crypto Current podcast as a guest speaker. Ari and Crypto Current’s host Richard Carthon dove deep into how to create breakthrough Web3 brands—particularly in cryptocurrency. Topics include Ari’s cryptocurrency “Alice in Wonderland” origin story, the markers of fanatic communities, ethical mandates for cryptocurrency and trading companies operating today, and how to grow audiences through human-centered design. 

Check out the video below, or [click here to listen](https://crypto-current.co/ariadna-navarro-vsa-partners-creating-breakthrough-web3-brands/). 

Ariadna Navarro Guest Speaker on Crypto Current Podcast

Headshot of Ariadna Navarro alongside Crypto Current banner

Cryto Current Podcast banner_headshot

VSA's Chief Creative Officer Curt Schreiber was selected to participate in the Design Museum of Chicago's latest exhibit, "The Correct Time." Curt was tasked with designing a clock face that challenges how we will design and think about time into the future. His work appeared alongside 23 other designers' pieces—one for each hour of the day—as part of an extension of Barbara Koenen's 1989 work "The Correct Time." Koenen's original piece collected 720 donated broken clocks, one for each minute in 12 hours. Afterall, a broken clock is right twice a day. 

The exhibit is free and open to the public until October 3, 2022 at the Design Museum of Chicago. [To learn more, click here](https://www.designchicago.org/the-correct-time). 

And check out the following reviews and press mentions of the exhibit:
- [3rd Coast Review: Hundreds of Clocks Show the Beauty and Absurdity of Time in New Design Museum Exhibit](https://thirdcoastreview.com/2022/08/13/review-clocks-design-museum-exhibit/)
- [Newcity: It’s About Time: A Review of The Correct Time at the Design Museum of Chicago](https://design.newcity.com/2022/08/17/its-about-time-a-review-of-the-correct-time-at-the-design-museum-of-chicago/)

This is an interactive entry—go ahead and give the number on Curt's piece a call!

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