When your identity stops matching the audience

I was at The Wesley this week, and it took me straight back to my grandparents.

They were born in 1918 and 1920 and spent most of their lives half a mile from us as part of our farm operation, so I saw them most summer days in my childhood. July was the one month that gave us a little room to breathe, once planting and wheat harvest were both behind us (even though my own July was usually swallowed up by 4-H fair prep). Somewhere in the middle of that, we’d still find time to drive to Kansas City for a Royals game, usually timed around my grandfather’s birthday at the end of the month.

In the mid-2000s, they moved off that farm and into what was then Wesley Towers, a senior living community in Hutchinson (KS). It’s called The Wesley now. We handled their rebrand a couple years ago, and walking through their campus this week reminded me how we helped them avoid a mistake a lot of organizations make without realizing it.

The Wesley has been around since 1964, when it broke ground as The Methodist Home. Its first resident in 1969 was a woman named Bessie Good, who moved in at the age of 103. For decades after that, the organization was built for (and largely built by) a generation that grew up in the Dust Bowl and weathered the Depression. It looked and sounded the way that generation expected a senior living community to look and sound: steady, formal, a little reserved.

That’s not who’s walking through the door anymore. The residents The Wesley is recruiting today are more likely to be avid travelers who socialize through the Corvette Club. A name, a logo, and a palette of colors that made complete sense in 1964 (or even in 1999) doesn’t automatically make sense to someone retiring now, and pretending otherwise is how organizations end up talking past the very people they’re trying to reach.

The identity had slowly stopped matching the audience it needed to serve, and the rebrand was about catching it up. “Wesley Towers” became “The Wesley” – shorter and less institutional. But the work didn’t stop at the website and the letterhead, which is where a lot of rebrands run out of steam. It made its way into the wayfinding signage and the physical campus, so the people living there now, and the families touring as prospective residents, experience the new identity in the campus itself instead of just reading about it in a brochure.

The mark that came out of that work is a hummingbird, which isn’t exactly the expected choice for a senior living community. But it fits. Hummingbirds are quick and bright and a little restless, and that’s a far closer match to the actual energy of people planning to spend their retirement on a Harley than a quiet, institutional crest ever could have been.

I asked the CEO how residents had responded to the change, and with a laugh, he told me he hadn’t heard a single complaint. If you know this population, and how firmly people can dig in over even small changes to routine or signage, that’s remarkable. It suggests the new identity felt like them, which is a hard thing to pull off.

Updating a logo file is easy enough. Walking every single touchpoint back through the new identity and asking whether it still holds up takes major attention, and most organizations stop somewhere around the website makeover.

Finding this kind of gap is an important piece of our Journey to Yes process. One of the first steps is a round of stakeholder interviews and audience profiles, because you can’t design an identity for people you’ve only guessed at. 

My grandparents’ Wesley Towers and today’s Wesley are serving the same mission with many of the same services and buildings. They’re not serving the same generation, though, and the brand had to catch up to that fact or risk spending years talking to people who’d already moved on without it.

If you’re looking at your own organization’s materials and client experience this week, ask yourself whether the person you actually need to walk through your door would recognize themselves in what you’re showing them. 

Lori