What Was Your Mindset and Motivation When You and Jim Brown Ventured out on Your Own in 2005?

Honestly. Our mindset when we first ventured out was this incredibly odd blend of “oh my God what have we done” combined with a confident sense of “hell yes, we can do this!” Our motivation was to challenge ourselves and to build something on our own that hopefully would have a lasting legacy. We both love Kansas City. We both love our families. We thought it would be cool to start a business here, grow it, and provide a place for passionate, creative folks to thrive, including our own children should they ever have the desire to go into this business. That part is a bit yet to be seen!

How Would Have Things Turned out Differently Had You Not Partnered With Others?

We both had, as we often say, “perfectly good jobs” before we went into business together. We could have easily stayed where we were and had absolutely fine careers. But, that wasn’t really the issue. Jim and I both had something more entrepreneurial burning inside. If we had not started our agency together, I’m pretty sure each of us would have ventured off into some other sort of start-up opportunity. Jim – probably some sort of amazing tech, IPO sort of thing. Me – bike shop in Hawaii. Hmmm.

Agencies Come in All Shapes and Sizes. What Do You Like About Your Current Size and Shape? and How Are Your Trying to Form It Moving Forward?

Agencies do come in all shapes and sizes, but honestly, actual size is less relevant today than it’s ever been. When you think about the ongoing partners we have across different disciplines, we’re already probably twice as big as the number of people who actually office here at MBB every day. We love having the ability to scale based on the needs of our clients. That being said, we love our current size – about 40 full-time folks. All of our client relationships are really great, because we just seem to fit together very well. People still do business with people and being of the size where we can really get to know each other is important to us. I like to say we’re big enough to have experts across all of the different agency functions, yet small enough to collaborate quickly and easily with each other and our clients. It provides for a certain flexibility that you don’t always get at larger shops. We love our size. We also obviously realize it’s critical to keep growing and that’s what we’re doing. Our vision is to keep what’s great about our culture intact as we continue to grow.

You Brand Hippo as a Creative Alternative to Healthcare Marketing. Can You Expand on That? Why Are You Different?

We love telling the hippo story. Ironically, a lot of agencies actually don’t do a great job of positioning themselves in the market place. We always talk about the “cobbler’s shoes…” But, in the case of hippo, we feel very good about what we’ve developed and it’s worked very well to date.

Like a lot of brands over the years, marketing was both mass and top-down. They screamed big brand, here’s what we think is a really interesting message, over and out, and we hope you buy our product. Obviously, that dynamic has changed dramatically over the years. Everyone reading this will not need that explanation. Working with a number of healthcare/hospital brand, however, we noticed that a lot of hospitals were still talking to “patients” or “prospective patients” in hospital language. While at the same time, using lots of predictable hospital imagery – doctors in lab coats holding clipboards (granted most are using EMR systems now), nurses holding a patient’s hand, and big, fancy equipment.

We saw the opportunity to turn things around a bit and to be more contemporary in our approach. Our positioning for hippo is “the creative alternative to healthcare marketing.” While we are very strategic, having worked in healthcare for over 30 years, we saw the need to communicate to patients as people first. We saw the need to talk to them in real, human language and not hospital-speak. The authentic, two-way conversation is what marketing is all about today, and it works for healthcare just like it works with more traditional consumer brands.

And finally, hippo is a derivative of the Hippocratic oath. In the actual oath, there is a ton of cool language about doing the right thing, the arts, and simply caring. That felt like us. We cheated, shortened it to hippo and used that as the name for our healthcare division. And of course that led to creating a fun “hippo” animal character. We have cool little “squeeze ball” hippos and quite a few stuffed hippos around the office. Who knew hippos were so popular?

WHAT IS YOUR LATEST EPIPHANY?

You’re never too old to learn. Sure, we’ve all heard that a million times, but lately I’m finding it to be very true. I’m teaching a branding class at the KU Edwards campus, and hopefully I have a few interesting things to share. My epiphany though, and not completely unexpected, is that I’m learning just as much from my awesome students as they are learning from me. I’m super grateful for that and excited to see so much passion out there for the discipline of marketing!