Home town heroes bring it together for this well known brand
When I started working with the folks at TruGreen, I was struck by how neighborly they were. As a part of the ServiceMaster brand family, you might think that they've gone all corporate with their digital brand translation. In that case, you would be wrong.
We developed a series of personas - fictional characters created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic, attitude and/or behavior or marketing segments that are associated with specific human.
Next, we examined the specific needs (and their differences) and modeled the tools and affordances that they needed on a transactional basis.
But what we found is that the decision to buy this kind of service is perceived to be price point by the customer, but in reality is is an emotionally driven consideration. So, we decided to emote a little.
Few things trigger emotional response like childhood memories, and almost everyone either was, or at least knew their neighborhood lawn kid. The agency came up with this character to embody the aspirations of a young kid climbing the ladder in search of fame and fortune.
By associating a young person to the service we lower the barriers to consideration. Instead of thinking about the hundreds of dollars in professional land care, we remember the days when you got paid $10 to mow a lawn. Friendly, familiar, and in relative terms inexpensive. Most importantly this was a kid you probably knew. If he messed something up, you called his mom, and he was there the next day to make good on it.
We tried to model a rather sophisticated lawn size estimator based on some available data so that we could provide a very accurate estimate of your annual lawn care costs. At the time TruGreen had a business practice where they would offer the first service for $29, regardless of the size of your lawn. After a couple of weeks modeling a solid algorithm we found that there was a lot more than just estimating going on when the local branch operator came out for the initial service call, again emphasizing the role of the branch staff.
Complex isn't it. Not good.
So next we looked at the importance of getting the branch staff out on the yard. Let them do the talking, they are the experts after all, plus, they are friendly and personable people that create the face of the brand.
What evolved from that was a fantastic engagement between the customer and the brand, made possible by the branch staff.
In these subsequent slides you can see how the "Branch Bob" was put front and center in the user experience.
I've always enjoyed working with visual designers (a lot), and on the TruGreen project I really felt the wires came to life through their creative explorations and executions.
