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Made of Montana:
Rewriting an Acquisition Story
My Role
Brand Strategist, Conceptual Lead, Creative Director, Art Direction.
The Challenge
Benefis, a beloved local hospital system in Montana, was expanding its operations following a recent acquisition. However, the community narrative had turned cynical, with locals fearing that a "big bad equity firm" had swallowed up their community hospital. The objective was to refresh the brand through human-centric storytelling, reframing the acquisition not as a corporate takeover, but as a vital rescue effort that provided the funding necessary for their local institution to thrive.
Strategy: Shared Roots and Lifestyles
We knew that putting out a polished, corporate manifesto wouldn't win back local trust. Instead, we anchored the strategy in a deeply relatable truth: the healthcare workers at Benefis weren't corporate transplants; they were born-and-raised Montanans.
We positioned the staff as neighbors who share the exact same rugged lifestyle as their patients, meaning they have a profound, personal understanding of how important it is to get healed and back out into the wild. We drew clever, poetic parallels between their medical expertise and their outdoor passions—comparing a doctor's ability to read an EKG to her ability to read a river, and connecting a surgeon's steady, life-saving hands in the OR to the subtle wrist-twitch needed to land a rainbow trout.
Execution
To visually distance Benefis from a sterile corporate entity, we entirely abandoned traditional healthcare marketing tropes. I directed an aesthetic that echoed a high-end outdoor lifestyle or tourism campaign.
We paired sweeping, rugged outdoor photography featuring providers fly fishing in Georgetown Lake, riding horseback, braving snowy trails, and mountain biking with bold, expressive brush-script typography. To solidify the local connection, we housed the body copy entirely within the silhouette of the Montana state map and anchored every ad with a unifying tagline: "Made of Montana. Made for You." The final result sent an unmistakable visual message: Benefis isn't just in Montana, it is Montana.
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