How a health tech innovator reclaimed their distinctiveness in a rapidly commoditizing category.
Client
HALLMARK HEALTH CARE
Industry
HEALTH TECHONOLOGY
Hallmark Health Care disrupted the clinical staffing agency world by developing the first and only vendor-neutral Vendor Management System (VMS): a tech platform that allows hospitals to find and staff flex workers from a pool of 750+ agencies’ worth of talent. The result: hospitals get access to more and better talent choices, without the 20-40% agency markup.
The problem? Agencies – big ones – immediately flooded the category, claiming to have “vendor-neutral” VMS platforms of their own. Hallmark’s value proposition quickly got lost in the swell of industry noise.
Hallmark needed a new story that would help them reclaim their reputation as a uniquely valuable partner for hospitals under pressure to staff the way their modern-day workforce wants to work.
CHALLENGE
There’s “category noise,” and then there’s what Hallmark was up against.
In the competitive scramble to differentiate its VMS platform, Hallmark had stopped highlighting a key feature of their solution that is competitively uncatchable. It’s a feature that’s vital to any hospital looking to staff flexibly for the long haul. And it’s a feature that’s surprisingly human.
OPPORTUNITY
Clinician staffing isn’t transactional. It’s intensely personal.
While competitors continued to hammer their VMS technology and product functionality, we developed a strategy to elevate Hallmark above the category noise and root the brand story in its customers’ day to day reality: the very human challenge of finding the best clinicians to care for patients…on a very limited budget.
Our strategy highlights Hallmark’s truly differentiated value proposition: Unlike staffing agencies (who make money when hospitals hire their nurses), Hallmark helps hospitals hire their own pool of at-the-ready flex nurses, and then equips them with the technology to deploy those nurses wherever they’re needed, at a moment’s notice.
AUDIENCE INSIGHT
When you work with a staffing agency, you’re not just outsourcing your hiring. You’re outsourcing your culture.
STRATEGY
Only Hallmark helps you build a modern clinical workforce that performs better, shows up happier, and costs less – because they work for you.
SOLUTION
Don’t just outsource. Insource.
We translated Hallmark’s new strategy into a reimagined brand story told across channels – from sales story, pitch deck, and website to a creative campaign as breakthrough as Hallmark’s solutions. It launched on the big screen at one of the industry’s largest trade shows: AONL 2025.
Sales Material Creative by Drift & Anchor.
Advertising Creative by Ideasicle.
