Clarifying the Brand: How HONE Helped Intuit Tell a New Kind of Story

As Intuit continues its transformation from a ‘DIY tax and accounting software provider’ to an ‘AI-driven platform’, telling a clear, compelling story that brings all four cornerstone brands together has never been more vital. For its latest commercials, Intuit brought in production-first strategy company, HONE, to execute a test campaign designed not just to share where Intuit is headed, but to help define how it shows up in the world.

This campaign marked a pivotal step in Intuit’s brand evolution and required a partner who could move with speed, clarity, and comfort in ambiguity. With plenty of experience working with brands to cut through complexity and deliver creative that connects to business transformation, HONE was up to the challenge. Even when stepping into the full-service agency role – as with Coca-Cola and Edible– the team maintains its production-first mindset.

Together, HONE and Intuit co-authored a story that reframes the brand’s role in people’s financial lives. From foundational strategy to production, the project exemplified why HONE’s model continues to resonate with future-focused marketers.

To get the full story, LBB’s April Summers spoke to Heather Bell, managing director at HONE, and Katie Potochney, VP of Intuit’s Creative Studio, about how the partnership worked, what it revealed about Intuit’s next chapter, and why this was as much a process of brand discovery as it was campaign delivery.

LBB> This campaign with Intuit feels like a true showcase of HONE’s flexibility and depth. Heather, can you walk us through how you built the creative and production team around the brief?

Heather> HONE approaches all projects the same, no matter the budget size or complexity of deliverables: we listen to what our clients want to accomplish at a high level, focusing on the end result. From there, we can work with our clients on the details to reach that goal and what skills are needed to build out the team to deliver.

Creating a senior team that appreciated the complexities of a large corporation was, of course, mandatory. But it was more complex than that. In this campaign, Intuit would be speaking for all four tentpole brands of the Intuit family: Mailchimp, TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Credit Karma. We had to fully understand the businesses and brands of each, and how they could coexist together in a big platform brand campaign.

Keeping the core team small, highly experienced, and dedicated solely to Intuit allowed us to crack the brief and produce the work in record time. As the project evolved and took different shapes, like all big brand campaigns do, we were able to be flexible and quickly supplement the team with more talent as needed, when needed.

LBB> Katie, due to the fact this project required a fresh articulation of the Intuit master brand, while still speaking for Mailchimp, TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Credit Karma, what were the biggest challenges in creating something cohesive yet distinct across such varied sub-brands?

Katie> We ran this pilot to test and learn what one Intuit platform message could drive across our products.

The challenge was all about discovery. We needed to reveal Intuit as the connective tissue between our product brands: a powerful platform bringing AI and human experts together. Intuit is the data and technology powering everything, creating tangible financial outcomes for customers.

These are the kinds of puzzles our in-house creative team is built to solve because we’re close to the business, we craft our own insights directly from data and research, we talk to customers daily, and we know Intuit can credibly carry the story. HONE has been a fantastic partner in augmenting our in-house perspective while helping us tackle a lot of firsts, both creatively and organisationally.

LBB> The task here was relatively contained - a pilot campaign - but the ambition behind it was still big. How did you approach building a hybrid model that could plug into Intuit’s existing infrastructure while also offering something bespoke?

Heather> HONE excels at flying the plane while we build it, and this was a perfect example of that, as well as how our transparent approach led the way. We knew the limits of what our capabilities could provide and we worked closely with the Intuit Brand and Transformation team to determine what roles would be best filled by them. Our goal was to partner with our client to avoid duplicating roles and leverage each other's strengths to build a highly tuned and efficient team that minimised extraneous fees and additional approval layers.

LBB> HONE brought in a hand-picked freelance creative team and partnered with SMUGGLER for production. What guided those decisions and what kind of tone or sensibility were you aiming to capture with this collective?

Heather> In addition to considering the skills, background and experiences each had, we were looking for partners that could bring personality and life to the Intuit brand. This is a 40-plus-year-old brand embracing an incredible opportunity for reinvention, and to become known in a fresh way, there were some legacy learnings we leveraged in shaping how the brand would sound. Our creative team articulated it for SMUGGLER, and its director Bjorn Ruhmann to bring it to life. The brand campaign at its foundation needed to be authentic, optimistic, with a touch of humour, while remaining strikingly cinematic, all of which fit Bjorn's sensibilities perfectly.

LBB> Katie, can you tell us a bit more about how HONE became embedded within this campaign, playing a strategic role that helped shape Intuit’s brand voice? What made that model valuable for you as a brand undergoing creative evolution?

Katie> HONE’s direct-to-production model was exactly what we needed in order to move fast on a complex story.

Intuit provides around 100 million consumers and businesses with financial intelligence and services, helping fuel their success. That meant the work had to reintroduce Intuit as the force behind Mailchimp, TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Credit Karma.
Having a tight, senior squad of HONE creatives and producers embedded with our internal creative team, along with our marketing leaders, was critical. They weren’t just executing, they were in the kitchen with us, experimenting and prototyping in real time, helping us weave together a story that would clarify what Intuit represents and what we stand for as a brand.

LBB> This campaign marks the first time Intuit has spoken from a master brand voice in nearly a decade. What made now the right time, and how did you want the brand to sound and feel in today’s market?

Katie> Intuit has been building toward this AI moment for years. We are the AI-driven expert platform that’s transforming how businesses run and grow with first-of-its-kind agentic AI experiences. When our vast amounts of data and AI capabilities are combined with the power of our trusted network of human experts, our uniquely designed, end-to-end platform unlocks next-level efficiencies, profitability, and growth for businesses. So, how do you show up and talk about that?

For the pilot, we positioned ourselves as the brand by your side in the AI era: trusted, human, and passionate about helping you prosper. Intuit exists to simplify money, which often feels overwhelming for most people, so our tone had to carry both empathy and confidence. We are the prosperity brand that’s cheering you on, giving you an edge, and removing the friction so you can meet your full potential and achieve your own prosperity, whether that’s growing a business or just keeping more money in your pocket.

LBB> From your perspective, how do independent partners like HONE offer something different than traditional agency partners, especially when it comes to speed, collaboration, or innovation?

Katie> Partners like HONE close the gap between business and creative in a way most traditional agencies can’t. They empower internal creative teams by complementing our closeness to the business with world-class production expertise, and that combination produces work at the highest calibre, faster. They embed, roll up their sleeves, and enable us to work in a faster, more fluid way. That can be a shock for stakeholders used to the agency process, but it raises everyone’s game because you’re solving business and creative problems in real time.

LBB> Having now worked with HONE across multiple brands over several years, can you tell us how has that continuity shaped your collaboration — and what has it enabled creatively and production-wise that might not have been possible with more traditional or one-off partnerships?

Katie> Trust is everything. I first worked with HONE while at Etsy, where I was a one-woman in-house team tasked with standing up our first TV creative pilots. HONE became a partner in crime, seeding Etsy’s nascent in-house capability, and it’s continued to be for each in-house team I’ve grown since: Wink Creative at Mailchimp and now the new Intuit Creative Studio.

HONE brings the rigour of top agency producers without the overhead or overpromising. I know its team will tell me exactly what’s doable, how to get the best result for the resources we have, and it’ll hold the work to the same high standard I do. That honesty and ambition – combined with their Rolodex of world-class talent – lets me confidently walk into leadership conversations and say, “Yes, we can pull this off, and we’ll do it without a retainer or overwrought team.”

This campaign was an important step in our journey to showcase Intuit to the world, and it wouldn’t have been possible without a partner who thrives in ambiguity. The pilot was as much about learning how to tell the Intuit story as it was about telling it. That’s the kind of work HONE excels at, and it’s why this partnership continues to evolve.

Check out what else HONE has been up to here

Read more from LBB's April Summers here