A billion things to love.

With a new brand, new logo and new tagline, Cox Communications needed a new way to show up at retail. The telecom giant was looking for a customer experience that could match the new mission for the brand: bringing us closer. But with more than a hundred stores in numerous layouts and formats across service regions, the experience also had to be highly modular and scalable. Digital to the rescue.

Taking a human-centered approach, we designed a digital-first in-store experience that meets customers where their needs are. Based on engagement zones, we crafted the experience around common user needs like changing service, demoing products, experiencing the difference between service tiers, getting a product recommendation tailored to their interests and exploring what’s possible with a home fully serviced with Cox’s TV, internet, phone and home automation solutions.

As QuickBooks had rapidly expanded their products and service tiers, the added product SKUs were tacked onto QuickBooks.com. As a result, the user experience had become increasingly convoluted, to the point where many users were unable to find and differentiate between products. Accountants were often purchasing the wrong product — subscribing to products meant for their advisory clients (B2C) rather than for them (B2B). Intuit brand managers recognized the problem and knew quick-fixes weren’t going to solve the underlying issue. It was going to take something much more drastic.

After several suggestions from Intuit to explode the entire web experience and rebuild it from the ground up, the effort was affectionately code-named “Project Dynamite.” Through rigorous usability testing and interviews, we discovered that much of the existing content was still worth salvaging. Rather, the pressing need was to show how each SKU fit into a broader QuickBooks ecosystem. One interview quote really summed up the goal of our effort: “How is Intuit making my life easier? Show me how it all connects.”

PEMCO is a regional insurance provider located in (and exclusively serving) residents of the Pacific Northwest. While Seattle and Portland markets were experiencing rapid growth in the insurance industry, PEMCO was reaping little or none of the benefit — continually being aced out by national insurance giants. They needed a smart campaign, paired with an entirely new website to build awareness and steal back a share of the growth happening right in their own backyard.

To find PEMCO’s market foothold, we conducted extensive research across customers, brands and the category as a whole. It became clear that PEMCO needed to position themselves as a local insider, rather than trying to be all things to all people. As a home-grown insurance provider, PEMCO understood the people and their lifestyles better than any out-of-state competitor ever could. So we devised a campaign to reposition PEMCO as a people-first insurer with a strong allegiance to the residents of the Pacific Northwest.

For over two decades, QuickBooks had offered an optional benefit program called ProAdvisor. It was built as a loyalty program that rewarded accountants for things they probably already did for their business anyway (enrolling new clients, completing training courses, etc.). In principle, the program was great: Sign-up was easy, rewards were meaningful and the redesigned point-earning structure was straightforward. The only problem? Nobody signed up for it.

Through numerous interviews with QuickBooks users, we heard the same request: Talk to us like people. We discovered that recent communication from ProAdvisor had relied heavily on wonky lecturing, sterile messaging and even professional stereotypes. To convince users to return to ProAdvisor, we needed to do something that would seriously subvert their expectations. And as the big QuickBooks annual conference approached, we knew it was our chance to make it clear that this wasn't the ProAdvisor these accountants had come to know and ignore.