MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. (Nov. 16, 2015) – Spyglass, a global brand strategy and marketing agency, announced they have won two prestigious MarCom Awards for their work with Jostens and Walman. Spyglass won a Gold award for their work on the Jostens Mobile Suite Product Launch, and a Platinum award for the recent Walman rebrand.

“The MarCom Awards are significant because the field of international entries is always substantial and represents outstanding work from an impressive list of marketers and global brands,” said Spyglass president and CEO, Molly Rice. “It means a lot to us, but also to our clients, because it’s proof that the work we’ve done on their behalf is among the best when it comes to connecting them to their target customer and creating ROI for their marketing spend.”

JOSTENS MOBILE
Jostens is America’s leading provider of yearbooks, class rings and graduation products as well as other programs and services that help students and their families celebrate and capture important moments in life. The Jostens mobile suite launch provided an opportunity for Jostens to rethink their complete mobile strategy. Spyglass showed them how SchoolWay and ReplayIt could fit into a broader mobile platform that would put Jostens at the forefront of innovation, reassert their position as a leader in the education space and bring other apps into the conversation. Today, they are using the new brand and strategy to onboard hundreds of new schools and thousands of parents and students.

Jostens has seen a 50 percent boost in usage of SchoolWay across the board from schools, parents and students since it launched in July 2014, and ReplayIt has experienced similar gains in usage.

“Spyglass helped us look at the big picture,” said Gloria Garcia, Jostens Director of Mobile Channels. “They understand the mobile landscape and how to attract new users. They not only helped us rename, rebrand and re-launch our apps, they showed us what to do over the course of the next two years to keep the momentum going.”

WALMAN BRAND REFRESH
Walman Optical was founded in 1915 and has grown substantially through acquisitions over the last several years. Today, they are the largest independent ophthalmic company in the U.S. and one of America’s great employee-owned companies—yet too many customers and prospects had no idea of their expertise because Walman operated under many brand names and divisions with no messaging or branding associating them to one other. It was a confusing situation and made it difficult for Walman to better serve customers across divisions. Walman Optical hired Spyglass to align their brands and give renewed focus to their vision to be the most trusted partner in the eye care industry.

Spyglass created the new master Walman brand as well as all of the sub-brands that live under and within the Walman family of businesses. They also created The Walman Advantage, a platform that properly positions and delivers the proof points that support the company’s position as an industry leader with several strong and integrated businesses guided by core values.

“After stakeholder interviews and other competitive research, we realized that the external perception was that the name ‘Walman Optical’ was only associated with their lab and lens business, versus all the national businesses owned by Walman Optical, including contacts, instruments, the buying group, frames and coatings,” said Rice. “We saw the rebrand as a huge opportunity for Walman to cross sell their outstanding services to current and prospective customers and a way to rally their internal team in time for the Walman 100th anniversary. They have a great story to tell. We aligned it and brought it to life.”

Walman CEO Marty Bassett summed up the award-winning branding experience nicely, “Through a highly-engaging and collaborative process, Spyglass helped Walman reimagine our brand and align our vision, mission and strategies.”

ABOUT THE AWARDS
The MarCom Awards recognize outstanding work in marketing communications from around the world. Thousands of entries are received each year for this international competition and come from corporate marketing and communication departments, advertising agencies, PR firms, design firms and production companies. For more information, visit www.marcomawards.com.

ABOUT SPYGLASS
Founded in 2001, Minneapolis-based Spyglass provides brand-consulting and marketing services for companies that want to redefine, reposition or re-launch themselves in the marketplace. The agency’s acclaimed Brand FastForward™ process delivers a brand strategy and a full complement of marketing and sales tools for a fixed price and delivered in weeks versus months so clients can get to market and achieve results faster. For more information, visit SpyglassCreative.com.