American Veterinary Group
The Challenge
American Veterinary Group (AVG) is a rapidly growing operator of veterinary practices and urgent care pet hospitals with nearly 3,000 employees throughout the United States.
AVG sought to define a shared cultural foundation and infuse their employer value proposition into the brand and employee experience.
The Solution
AVG and Capsule partnered in an intensive cultural research, strategy and communications initiative to strengthen and codify the brand’s internal and external meaning.
AVG's distinct business model of acquiring and integrating independent practices, alongside the expansion and opening of its own UrgentVet clinic brand nationwide, made it an incredibly rich culture to capture at a parent brand level. This underscored the importance of representing the unique internal voices from across positions, locations and experiences in the final strategy.
Cultural Champion Research
With the goals of clearly articulating AVG’s company culture and understanding their consistency and relevance across diverse audiences, Capsule designed an inclusive, multi-method internal research study to gather authentic insights about the brand and its employee experience.
Step one was defining current state assumptions and a future vision for AVG’s culture through a collaborative executive leader workshopping and journaling process to ensure alignment on expectations.
Surveying 1,215 employees, 56 hand-selected team members - dubbed ‘cultural champions’ - in an in-depth questionnaire and hosting several leadership workshops, Capsule explored how AVG embodies their organizational assumptions and employee experiences. From this research, we were able to understand unique and shared perspectives from home office staff to veterinarians to practice managers and technicians.
The research revealed cultural pillars of empowerment, autonomy and continuous growth, all made possible through a deep foundational respect for people and the trusting, open relationships.
These insights translated into a robust strategy. Capsule worked with AVG to craft a new brand purpose and core values, as well as a brand personality and differentiators that reflected the culture they had built.
A Heartfelt Brand
Capsule used this framework to create a new brand mark as well as an updated messaging system, centering around the cultural ethos and tagline of “Relationships are at the heart of everything we do”.
The new mark modernizes AVG’s identity, aligning it to attributes of approachability, care and innovation, as well as improving functionality and flexibility in use. Combining an abstracted heart and lowercase “a,” AVG’s logo is a simple, yet distinctive form reinforcing its focus on relationships.
This new mark also inspired a dynamic set of graphic brand icons stemming from the heart of the mark to celebrate the breadth of animals that AVG serves.
Messaging System
The new messaging system communicates AVG’s culture and story in an engaging and consistent way to current and prospective employees, helpful for situations such as recruitment, new employee and hospital onboarding.
These assets enabled the internal team to not only put words to the experiences they felt, but to position AVG externally as a competitive, fulfilling place for employment. It also empowered new practices such as an employee intranet and internal communication cadences.
The Impact
Since its reveal, AVG has put this new brand to work, flexing their new language and assets from website and tradeshow booth activations, to social media, sweet treats, signage and the ‘dog park’ (AVG’s break room!). It’s also inspired the launch of a new AVG Career website to celebrate their culture and engage with prospective employees.
We at Capsule are thrilled to have contributed to AVG's brand purpose: to build an inclusive, fulfilling and authentic culture as the bedrock for people and business to thrive upon.
Client Testimonial
“Although we felt we had built a strong cultural foundation at AVG in a relatively short period, we struggled to consistently articulate the components of that culture as we continued our rapid growth. The Capsule team did an incredible job of facilitating internal conversations among the teams, distilling that feedback into consistent themes, and ultimately developing a cultural statement and visual representation that reflects what our teams felt all along. I can’t thank them enough for their guidance and creativity in this process.”
Craig Niebur CEO, American Veterinary Group
