A strange thing happened when Foley Equipment asked for a new website. DMH, the Kansas City agency hired to think about the website, decided the website was not the problem. Foley was a Caterpillar dealer. Caterpillar is the sort of master brand that can fill every inch of a room without moving. Customers knew CAT. They could picture the yellow machines. Foley, meanwhile, risked becoming the small logo tucked in the corner - the intermediary nobody quite noticed until a hydraulic line burst and a job stopped moving.
The first thing to fail, in other words, was not navigation or typography. It was the explanation of why the dealer mattered. DMH shifted Foley's story from equipment for sale to uptime protected: the service, responsiveness and local judgment wrapped around the machine. Only then did it rebuild the site around how customers actually work - quickly, practically and with no appetite for a leisurely browse.
“The ask may have been for a website, but this was not a website problem. It was a messaging problem.”DMH's Foley Equipment case study
This is the cleanest way to understand DMH. Founded in 2007 by Paul Diamond, Brian Merckens and Sean Hogan - there are your initials - the privately held firm sells the familiar agency menu: brand development, creative, websites, media buying, public relations, social, search and physical environments. The distinctive part is not the menu. Plenty of agencies can arrange those nouns in a handsome row. DMH's pitch is that a channel should be chosen after the obstacle is understood.
Foley Equipment results are reported by DMH for the first year after launch. The site was also named a 2025 Webby Awards honoree for navigation and structure.
The useful refusalResearch gets to veto the brief
The Foley story might sound like a clever retrofit: call a website strategy “positioning” and collect a case study. The Canopy Animal Health work is harder to dismiss. Canopy wanted to enter pet CBD at a moment when the category was noisy, dubious and legally awkward. It did not yet have a product to sell. Research delivered the uncomfortable fact that changed the plan: 76 percent of pet owners said they would not give CBD to a pet without consulting a veterinarian.
That made the veterinarian the audience with veto power. So DMH did not begin by chasing pet owners with packaging and lifestyle imagery. It helped Canopy establish scientific credibility through veterinary continuing education, conference panels, a thought-leadership summit, expert ambassadors, educational sites and trade media. The competitor was reframed too. Canopy would not behave like one more supplement on a crowded shelf. It would act like a science company addressing conditions often treated with pharmaceuticals.
The repeatable part of the method
The results DMH publishes are unusually specific for an agency portfolio: 120 academic and industry experts recruited as ambassadors, more than 75 earned-media placements, and 90 percent awareness among veterinarians within nine months. The phrase DMH uses is better than the standard launch vocabulary: “Trust was the first product.”
A brand you walk throughSometimes the media plan is a hallway
At Ford's Kansas City Assembly Plant, the obscured asset was neither a dealer nor a new therapy. It was the plant itself. KCAP had 9,500 workers, 4.7 million square feet and annual production of more than 433,000 F-150s, yet the surrounding community mostly called it Claycomo. DMH built an identity around the people inside the factory, with the line “The Heart of Ford Beats Here,” then placed it in the path between the executive garage and assembly floor, around entrances and above plant-control boards.
DMH estimates those installations deliver 10,000 impressions a day, or 3.6 million a year. It is a neat example of the agency's broad definition of brand. A message on a factory wall counts. So does a dealer's service menu, a veterinarian's confidence, a search ad and the tone of a press interview. DMH summarizes the idea as “Brand is everything. Everything is brand.” The line could become mush in less disciplined hands. Here it describes the agency's business model: research and strategy at the center, then execution across whatever touchpoints the problem requires.
The price of the workOne public number, carefully handled
Private agencies rarely post rate cards, and DMH is no exception. A government record does offer one historical window. In 2017, the City of Overland Park considered a revised agreement with Diamond Merckens Hogan for a website redesign and upgrade valued at $109,331, inside a project budget not to exceed $120,000.
The revised 2017 municipal agreement. It is a useful artifact, not a current quote: scope, technology, staffing and prices have all had nine years to change.
Today the agency serves organizations ranging from Gallant, a pet regenerative-medicine company that named DMH agency of record in January 2026, to the Truman Library Institute's America250 campaign. It also works across agriculture, education, finance, healthcare, food, retail and manufacturing. That range is not the same as infinite reach. DMH appears best suited to organizations with a complicated story, several stakeholder groups and enough operational substance for research to uncover something meaningful.
What to stealAsk who must believe before asking what to make
The transferable move is small enough to fit in a meeting. Put two sentences on the wall. The first begins, “The client asked us to make...” The second begins, “The result cannot happen because...” If the endings are identical, proceed. If they are different, the brief is describing an output rather than the obstacle. Then identify the person with practical veto power. For Canopy it was the veterinarian. For Foley it was the customer trying to keep a job moving. For KCAP it was the worker who needed to see the plant as more than a building in Claycomo.
This works when the organization is willing to let evidence alter the assignment, when leaders can align around a sharper position, and when the agency is allowed to carry that position into actual operations. It will be less useful for a fixed production job, a client seeking only cheap volume, or a company whose experience cannot support the promise. Research cannot rescue a poor product. An elegant message about uptime is worthless if the dealer does not answer the phone.
DMH's competition includes strong Kansas City independents, specialist digital shops and global networks with deeper benches. Its answer is proximity: a flatter team, senior people close to the work, and one agency connecting the strategic diagnosis to the execution. The wager is not that every client needs every service. It is that every service should be accountable to the same idea.
That is why the Foley story matters. Four-digit navigation growth is nice. The more durable lesson arrives before the first wireframe, when someone has the nerve to say that the thing everyone came to discuss is not yet the thing worth fixing.