Kevin Trapani grew up in the YMCA community, as a Y camp counselor, lifeguard, swim coach, and aquatics director. After spending the first part of his career working for a variety of insurance companies, Kevin founded The Redwoods Group in 1997 to service what many in the insurance industry would categorize as “unattractive” customers: YMCA camps and Jewish community centers (JCCs). Most insurance companies weren’t interested in these customers because of the high degree of risk due to the threat of child sexual abuse, drowning deaths, and vehicular accidents, among other issues.

Even though these YMCA camps and JCCs represented an untapped business opportunity for insurers, Kevin didn’t start Redwoods just to make money. One of his goals was to give back to organizations that had done many good things for him over the years. So he began the business with a dream to serve others, giving away as much as 50% or more of the company’s profits to social causes each year, paying employees to do at least a week of community service on company time every year, and improving safety and saving lives at YMCA camps and JCCs, among other charitable contributions.

Eventually, Kevin turned Redwoods into a B-Corporation, an innovative new breed of company using the power of business to drive social benefit. Businessweek named Kevin one of the Most Promising Social Entrepreneurs of 2010.

Clearly, Redwoods is not your average insurance company. So when the company embarked on its first formal positioning project with New Kind, it was a relatively simple task to uncover positioning that, to paraphrase brand expert and author Kevin Keller, would be desirable to customers, deliverable by the brand, and differentiated from competitors.

After extensive research and a series of workshops, the positioning team settled on the following positioning framework: First, Redwoods would be positioned in the “specialty insurance” competitive frame of reference, although there would also be broader positioning for the organization in the “social entrepreneur” frame of reference. Next, the team clearly identified two points of parity: price and coverage.While Redwoods would not always deliver the lowest price because it was providing other services competitors didn’t offer, the price and coverage options had to be good enough that, given their strengths on the points of difference, customers would still choose them.

By this time, it was fairly clear what made Redwoods different from other special insurance providers—Redwoods is a mission-based company that truly cares about the health and well-being of YMCAs and JCCs and the people they serve and shows this through its actions, not just its words. Eventually the team settled on three words to describe the key points of difference: love, serve, and transform.

The thinking went this way: Love is mostly missing in the modern business world. Thus, by creating a business rooted in a deep, authentic love and sense of responsibility—for customers and their clients, for employees, and for all the communities it serves—Redwoods will serve these segments better than any other insurer could.

This act of serving that is deeply rooted in love would in turn help transform these communities, and Redwoods itself in the process. Love, serve, transform became not just the points of difference that separate Redwoods from its competitors, but now essentially have become the brand mantra of the organization that guides decisions and actions within the organization.