In the last couple months I’ve had the privilege of working on a health and wellness committee at my place of employment.  Our first objective?  Education and excitement!  In other words: Spreading the word about the wellness program and resources we offer to employees and getting people on-board.  After some discussion and review of past efforts, we determined that the program needed a makeover, a corporate wellness program re-branding.

Being a communications and branding nerd, I find this process fascinating and want to share it with you, my lovely readers.

We started by identifying our objectives – What do we want this re-branding to accomplish?  What is the the heart of this wellness program that we are trying to get people excited about?  What image do we want employees to associate with it?  How do we want their perception of the program to be?  While I totally believe that it is possible to stumble upon success/great ideas accidentally, I also totally believe in identifying goals and having a semi-structured approach to reaching them – thus the whole identifying objectives thing.  It doesn’t always need to be strict structure, but really, have you ever heard of a committee that got anything done without some sort of organization?  [Insert joke about ever hearing about committee’s getting anything done, ever, here…jk]

Next step was a company-wide contest to help re-name the program.  This brought in over 80 entries, which we then got to sort through.  The key to this process was actually step one, our objectives for the program.  Each time we considered a name that we thought had potential, I matched it against what we were trying to communicate.  This perspective helped our team’s focus immensely.  We narrowed it down to three choices and then I put together “pitches” for each finalist.  The point of this part of the process was to help the rest of the committee visualize what each idea would look like in application.

At the end of the day, the committee ended up selecting GO – working toward wellness.  Full Disclosure – This was my top choice going into the selection process, so I’m thrilled that the committee eventually agreed with my great branding wisdom 😉

From there I developed an official logo, a newsletter (which you can read HERE), and some sweet T-Shirts.

The re-branding process definitely generated a lot of excitement and program awareness internally, so I would consider it a success in the short-term.  My hope is obviously that it will be a success in the long-term as well, but the funny thing about the long-term is that you need to wait long-term to see how things develop.  I am optimistic.  But then, why wouldn’t I be optimistic about something that has my fingerprints all over it – of course I think it’s fabulous 😉

THE FUNNY THING about health programs, whether it’s a weight loss plan, a 5k training schedule, or an organic diet is that they all require an enormous amount of personal motivation.  Changing something about yourself is hard work, really, really, really hard work.  You have to suck it up and stick to it, even when you don’t feel like, or it doesn’t happen. End of story.  A T-shirt that Alissa Jean designed is not gonna be enough to cause a life-change, no matter how cool it looks, but hopefully it helps inspire it though.  That is a decision that needs to be made by that person, individually, with a whole lotta heart.  So, I will do my very best to get everyone excited about a program, make it look awesome, provide all sorts of incentives and support, but I understand that my personal goal is more than just marketing the program.  My personal goal is to get employees thinking about their health and understanding that they have to take the next steps themselves.  Re-branding a wellness program is a lot more then selling a product – it’s about getting at the heart of the matter, employees’ personal motivation to live healthy lives.

So let’s go run some intervals, ya game?

Always, Alissa Jean