Jack Henry – Brand Strategy
Financial
Jack Henry & Associates is a financial-tech company that services banks and credit unions, whose mission is to strengthen connections between people and their financial institutions through technology. As a well-known brand in their category, they’d grown over the years through both acquisition and organic growth. When they came to us, they had four different brands in their portfolio, each with their own strong brand equity in the marketplace.
While each individual brand was successful on its own, Jack Henry & Associates was spending a great deal of time and money to support disparate brands. Ready to raise brand awareness and reduce internal costs, Jack Henry &Associates came to us for support in shifting their disparate brands into a single entity.
Facing both internal and external concerns, Jack Henry & Associates came to us for some deeper insights. We leveraged internal perspectives on the individual brands, competitive landscape and voice of customers to get a complete view of the disparate brands—and ensure our strategic recommendations took both similarities and differences into account. This initiative warranted various research methods to fully understand brand perceptions.
Customer Intercepts
Each year, Jack Henry hosts a client user conference where hundreds of people come together to learn about industry trends and the advancement and evolution of Jack Henry’s products. We recorded 300 intercepts at the conference, gauging both positive and negative perceptions, awareness of each brand under the Jack Henry umbrella and awareness of Jack Henry’s relationship to those brands, as well.
In-depth Interviews
To understand a variety of perspectives associated with the Jack Henry brands, we conducted 54 in-depth interviews—23 with stakeholders and 31 with clients and prospects at Jack Henry’s client user conference.
Our intercepts and in-depth interviews led us to a valuable, strategic insight: people perceived Symitar, Jack Henry Banking and ProfitStars as more similar than different—and they already associated these brands with Jack Henry &Associates, which led us to believe it was a smart move to combine into a single-named entity.
Competitive Marketing Audit
Our competitive audit gave us two big ideas to bring to our sales and marketing value proposition workshop: Is there a strategic white space within the industry that Jack Henry can own, and is there a space we have the right to own because we’re the best in that area?
Sales & Marketing Value Proposition Workshop
We brought together more than 20 members of the various Jack Henry marketing teams and presented our customer intercepts, in-depth interviews and competitive marketing audit findings to them—and spent a day brainstorming, ideating and exploring different territories based on our data.
Brand as Friend Workshop
Our Brand as Friend™ approach is designed to help brands create deeper, more authentic connections with customers. We encouraged Jack Henry to think outside the box with a workshop consisting of open dialogue, voting and interactive exercises to ultimately hone in on the components of their brand that would create affection, relevance and trust with customers.
Quantitative Survey
Our final piece of research, a quantitative survey, helped us test and validate the messaging we explored in our value proposition workshop. We discerned which messages would be the most differentiated, motivating and believable to potential audiences using the MaxDiff approach, which looks at not just ranking order, but also order of importance.
Our efforts laid the groundwork for Jack Henry’s new, standalone brand. The company unanimously agreed to shift their name from Jack Henry & Associates to Jack Henry and chose to design a new logo that was current and reflective of their new brand identity, using lowercase letters for a modern, friendly and approachable look.
Our work with Jack Henry evolved into a promise of “Providing all people with opportunities to live a life of financial well-being,” which they used as the foundation for their new creative platform and logo.
Key Brand as Friend® drivers:
Hey! Our name is pronounced Mōw-rrr, like this thing I’m pushing.