Celebrating your corporate anniversary is more than just marking a milestone, it’s making a mark with everything you do and say

What’s the best way to celebrate a 70-year-old brand? Consistently live the mission, of course! Robin Tooms interviews Kym King, Vice President of Public Relations at Goodwill Houston.

Robin: Hello and welcome to this edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies. I am Robin Tooms, VP of Strategy at Savage Brands and my guest again is Kym King, Vice President of Public Relations at Goodwill Houston. So Kym, so glad that you’re back on Brandonomics.

Kym: Thank you so much, it’s great to be here Robin.

Robin: Well Kym this is also the 70th anniversary year for Goodwill Houston and that’s pretty amazing for one thing, just 70 years, but it gave you an opportunity to really celebrate the brand. So I’m curious what you’re doing to help celebrate the brand this year.

Kym: We are using this as an opportunity to celebrate all year long. One of the things we’re doing is we have 3 big fundraising and friend-raising events every year; our gala, our Moreton Achievement awards where we honor our employees and program participants and our golf tournament. And we are infusing 70th anniversary messages into all three of those events. But the thing I think I’m most excited about is our 70th anniversary television spots that we’re doing with our media partner KPRC. We wanted to use this as an opportunity to help people better understand our mission because one of our great brand challenges is people know our name, they know our retail stores and donation centers, but they’re not always as clear on the mission as we would like. And so we selected community leaders, government leaders, business leaders and we wrote scripts for them specifically designed to help people understand our mission and then to have them congratulate us on 70 years.

So for example, we asked the mayor to say whenever Goodwill opens a new store they create 25 new jobs and that helps our local economy, and then to congratulate us on 70 years. We asked the president and CEO of The United Way, who we partner with, to talk about how together we help people learn about finances and then she congratulated us. We had former Harris County Sherriff Adrian Garcia talk about the programs that we have that we partner with with the Harris County jail to help people who are formerly incarcerated get back on their feet and turn their lives around. And so every spot said something about one of our programs or our services that were designed to help people find jobs or build careers or turn their lives around as it related to work, and it said we’re 70 years old and we’ve been changing lives for 70 years.

Robin: Well I did see those videos and they’re very well done, so I appreciate the work you put into that.

Kym: Thank you.

Robin: I would also say perhaps a good strategy behind that is the fact that because you did the videos and you got the chance to talk to all of these great partners again, is an outcome of that strengthening the partner relationships?

Kym: Absolutely, absolutely. In fact, a great example of that is Galveston. So we have a store, a donation center and a job connection center on the island of Galveston. We’ve been serving the residents there for a long time. We got a new partnership with the Convention and Visitor’s Bureau and the Galveston Chamber of Commerce when we remodeled that entire store. We did a multi-million dollar remodel, had a big ribbon cutting, we had the mayor come and it was just an extension of that great partnership to have them come and be part of the spot. Because you know when you’re in Houston the region is so big, everybody always says Houston but people don’t always say Pearland or Galveston or some of the other cities and let me tell you, when you live in Galveston you don’t live in Houston, right?

You consider yourself an islander and so it really did help strengthen our partnership to ask them to be a part of these spots and to really highlight our commitment to the island of Galveston.

Robin: I appreciate you sharing that and the fact how it’s helped to build the brand awareness.

Kym: Thank you.

Robin: Well thank you for sharing that. This has been another edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies.

 

Through nine job connection service centers and many grant-funded programs, Goodwill Houston provides job training and placement services to people with barriers to employment. This includes veterans, older workers, youth, the formerly incarcerated and, of course, individuals with disabilities. Whether you donate your gently used items, shop at our stores, volunteer your time, or give through our various fundraising activities and events, your generosity helps change a life. https://www.goodwillhouston.org/