A selection of engagements Heidi led throughout her career involving research, brand strategy, and integrated marketing to shape how audiences engage with high-profile brands.
“The menu, finally as personal as your beverage.”
Challenge. For a brand with one of retail’s strongest loyalty programs, the most-visited surface inside every store was still a printed wall. Cafe boards could not adapt to season, daypart, weather, or the buying patterns of a particular neighborhood, leaving tens of millions of weekly visits to receive the same generic offer regardless of context. Drive-thru pilots had already hinted at the upside of dynamic displays; the larger prize was bringing that same intelligence into the cafe itself, where customers spend the most time and the brand has the richest opportunity to recommend.
Approach. We helped frame the in-store digital menu board program as the physical end of Starbucks’ personalization flywheel, connecting the data already powering the app, Rewards, and Deep Brew AI to the moment of decision at the counter. The strategy layered three kinds of relevance onto every board: seasonal lineups that shift week to week, dayparting that flows from morning bakery to afternoon refreshers, and location signals that surface what is resonating in a given store, neighborhood, or weather pattern. Earlier drive-thru rollouts established the operational playbook; the cafe program scaled the model into the foundation for full deployment across 11,000 US company-operated stores.
“GoSmart, Not Dum.”
Challenge. Post-recession, the fastest-growing segment of US wireless was a customer the major carriers were systematically overlooking: budget-conscious adults, students, and young earners making $30K–$40K, who valued unlimited talk and text far more than premium data, and who were tired of hidden fees, annual contracts, and brands that talked down to them. T-Mobile needed a separate, credible voice for this audience, distinct from its postpaid business and from MetroPCS.
Approach. Research sharpened the audience proposition into three tightly-priced tiers ($30, $35, $45), a bring-your-own-phone option, and a reseller-led distribution model that met value-seekers where they already shopped. A nine-market pilot beginning December 2012 signed up tens of thousands of customers and exceeded internal projections within weeks, validating positioning, pricing, and channel mix ahead of the 2013 nationwide launch across 3,000+ reseller stores.
“A more beautiful way to search.”
Challenge. By the early 2010s, Bing had closed the gap with Google on relevance, speed, and feature parity, yet its market share stayed stuck. Microsoft’s own research pointed to the real barrier: habit. The majority of Google users were “sleepwalking,” defaulting out of pure inertia, and no amount of technical proof was going to wake them up. Bing needed an emotional reason to be reconsidered.
Approach. Built a digital brand campaign around Bing’s most distinctive asset: the daily landscape photography that already defined its homepage. By treating those images as the campaign’s visual through-line across display, video, and social, we repositioned search from a utilitarian box into a daily moment of discovery. Bing saw the web, and the world, with a different sensibility. The work shifted the conversation from feature comparison to brand feeling, supporting Bing’s climb to its US market-share peak in 2014.
“Explore more. Spend less.”
Challenge. Between 2008 and 2012, a wave of mergers concentrated roughly 83% of US air-travel capacity into four mega-carriers, and Delta opened a new hub directly inside Alaska’s Seattle home market. As a regional carrier with a fraction of the network reach, frequent-flyer scale, and corporate-travel pull of its rivals, Alaska faced existential pressure from above while recession headwinds and low-cost-carrier fares squeezed yields from below. The brand needed to give travelers a meaningful reason to choose a smaller airline at the precise moment the industry was telling them bigger was better.
Approach. Led a multi-year “Explore More. Spend Less.” campaign across out-of-home, transit, digital, and newspaper, built on a modular postcard-grid system. Each layout assembled a checkerboard of destination snapshots, like whales off Los Cabos, breakfast in Mazatlán, treehouses in the Cascades, or pools in Palm Springs, turning the campaign promise into visual art that customers could read in seconds.
“Never the same zoo twice.”
Challenge. Woodland Park Zoo experienced the impacts of a King County levy cut that erased roughly 12% of its operating revenue. Generations of Seattleites had “already been” and saw no reason to come back, while the zoo’s genuinely world-class conservation work, from Western Pond Turtles to Papua New Guinean Tree Kangaroos, sat almost entirely invisible in the public brand.
Approach. Over six years and seven campaigns, the team developed a creative platform around one strategic emotion: make the zoo feel alive, surprising, and worth showing up for again. The work rejected every convention of zoo advertising, no parade of cute animal photos, no “open daily” messaging. Instead the series of campaigns were created out of real insights. The “See. Save.” campaign positioned your visit to the zoo as critical to supporting animal conservation. The “Never the same zoo twice” campaign encouraged repeat visits to the zoo to catch a glimpse of the next active animal of the day, and the lucrative “Dinosaurs. Real Close.” campaign used humorous videos of scared parents to draw families to experience the life-like dinosaur exhibit.
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