Taking a Brand New Look at Business Growth Gorman & Bunch Orthodontics

Dr. Jason Bunch had grown tired of the bland continuing education events he and his peers were required to attend in order to maintain their state license. He wanted to create something new and different for dentists from across Indiana — an event that would both offer dental practices tools to grow their business and foster relationships with referring dentists for Gorman & Bunch Orthodontics. After initiating the project internally, they reached out to Keyhole Marketing for help in creating an event name, developing a brand, and overseeing the inaugural event.

When Gorman & Bunch first reached out, the practice referred to the event as “The Gamechanger.” It was initially meant as a description of what Dr. Bunch hoped to offer attendees — an event that changes the tired game many dental practices had been playing — and somewhere along the way it had been adopted internally as the name of the event. Concerned that name might be too literal, our work on the event began with a discovery meeting with various team members. We then presented the following name options that we believe better indicated the purpose, caught people’s attention, and remained memorable:

THE SHIFT
Moving Your Practice Forward

THE SWITCH
Changing the Game of Dentistry

ELEVATE
Taking Your Practice to New Levels

THE FRINGE
Move Away From the Ordinary

THE SLANT
Lean Your Practice in a New Direction

After Gorman & Bunch quickly selected THE FRINGE: Move Away From the Ordinary, we then pulled in our friends at Co-motion and Revolvere to create a visual identity for this event — specifically developing a logo, style guide, landing page, postcard, and email template. Built off a brief discovery session, we began with the creation of multiple logo concepts, ranging from safe to risky. (See below) Somewhat surprisingly, Gorman & Bunch selected the last — riskiest — option, appreciating how it would visually push attendees to lean toward the fringe.

From there, we created a simple website where we would push attendees in our promotional materials. We directed Co-motion and Revolvere in creating a one-page landing page that briefly presented the unique approach of the event, described the agenda/speakers, and offered an easy registration process. Here was the final result.

Landing Page

Building off these designs, we worked with Co-motion to present the brand story in an email template and two postcard designs — one to be mailed and one to be hand delivered by Gorman & Bunch staff.

Postcard

Email Template

With a goal of attracting 200 dental practitioners, we knew this event would require meticulous management of the major and minor details in order to reach Dr. Bunch’s objectives. To do so, we established a comprehensive Basecamp plan that identified a detailed timeline and assigned specific project ownership. While not the sexiest part of the planning process, it proved to be the most vital part of this project because of the limited availability and event planning experience by the Gorman & Bunch staff. Some of the major tenants of the plan included:

• Brand Management
• Promotional Strategy and Execution
• Content Creation + Implementation
• Registration
• Venue Coordination
• Sponsorships
• Online Registration
• Tech Coordination
• Guest Experience

As expected when developing the promotional plan, we saw consistent spikes in registration numbers following each promotional push. And by the end, we surpassed our registration goals by over 25 percent. And when looking past the statistics, the feedback shared on the surveys gave us all confidence the inaugural event was a huge success.

At the event, we also captured photography to be utilized in promotional material for future events. We’ve also begun dreaming up regional/digital continuing education events as lead ups to the annual live conference. More to come on the latter.