Page 8 - Mobility Management, April 2018

mm beat
“New Look, Same Big Heart”
NSM Launches Rebrand
Growth is the goal of every company. But growing successfully requires more than just increasing revenue and adding employees. As a company’s roster expands, how do you bring new employees into your company’s culture? How do you make them feel as relevant and valued as employees who’ve been with the company for decades?
It’s a question that’s particularly important for National Seating & Mobility (NSM), given the complex rehab tech- nology provider’s expansive growth the last few years. By acquiring existing providers and opening new branch of ces, NSM now has 123 locations across the United
“This brand development process has been going on since March [2017],” she said. “Internally, Bill said this was a uni cation of all the companies that had come under the NSM umbrella. That has a lot to do with culture. This process was really for us to understand not only what people on the outside thought about NSM, but also what our employees felt about NSM so we appropriately built a brand that re ected who we are.”
Rather than assume or guess at NSM’s reputation, the company hired brand experts and third-party researchers to guide a thoughtful discovery process involving phone interviews and online surveys from stakeholder groups, including clients, referral sources, employees and payors. In the end, NSM received feed- back from almost 2,000 people across the spectrum of stakeholders. The process of collecting and analyzing the research took about three months.
“What came back,” Mixon said, “was that we are a trustworthy, open and honest company. We have a
very strong reputation, and we’re perceived as not only being a leader in the industry, but that we have the best interests of our clients at heart. This resonated over and over again.”
Vision, Mission, Values
This was no small rebranding effort. NSM planned not just to create a new corporate logo, but also a new tagline, vision and mission statements, core values and all-new marketing materials.
“It was nice to see that how we felt about ourselves was af rmed by the research, but it also solidi ed in our minds the need to continue with the brand invest- ment,” Mixon said. “We spent hours of executive time wordsmithing every word, every comma, every semi- colon. We’re proud of the outcome. If you read those last couple of sentences in the vision statement — it’s powerful, I think.”
The vision statement, along with other rebranding information, can be read on nsmletsgetmoving.com,
a microsite launched in concert with the brand rede- sign. The end of the vision statement Mixon referred to says, “We will never be satis ed until we have exceeded the expectations of those we serve in our quest to be a trusted partner. Breaking more barriers, impacting more lives. Taking us where we aspire to be, and our clients,
States and almost 1,600 employees total.
In some ways, adding employees was the easy part.
Making them truly part of the NSM culture would take a different kind of effort.
A Constellation of Many Companies
Bill Mixon, NSM’s CEO, says that goal has been on his mind for a while. “I’m approaching four years (with
NSM) and had been thinking a lot about the NSM brand because over the past three years in particular, we have become a constellation of many companies,” he told Mobility Management. “It’s like an extended family. So for a while I’d been thinking we needed to do something, as we’ve matured as an organization, to bring together this fantastic group of people.”
Among those new to NSM is Stephanie Buckley, VP of marketing, who joined the company in January 2017.
8 APRIL 2018 | MOBILITY MANAGEMENT
MobilityMgmt.com