JMI Built a Marketing Agency Around the Question Everyone Else Skips

Kenneth Johnson has a habit that is almost suspiciously simple. At the beginning of a meeting, he asks: “How are we defining success?” It sounds like the sort of line that belongs on a conference-room wall. At JMI, the Richmond firm he founded in 1993, it behaves more like a trapdoor. The question opens beneath the assignment and exposes what is really being bought. More visitors? Better applicants? A construction project that includes local suppliers? A piece of public history residents can recognize as their own? Until that answer is clear, the logo, spot, event or press release is merely expensive motion.

This is what makes JMI hard to file neatly. It is a brand agency, certainly. It researches markets, develops strategy, makes advertising and social content, handles public relations and produces events. But it is also a community-engagement consultancy, a supplier-development adviser and, in one notable case, a kind of civic editor. Its client list moves from Dominion Energy and VCU Health to Virginia Tourism, Indivior, construction companies, cultural institutions and local government. The outputs look unrelated. The method does not.

“How are we defining success?”Kenneth S. Johnson, founder and CEO

The useful pauseBefore the message, find the missing conversation

The conventional agency starts with an audience and races toward a message. JMI slows down at the word audience. Who is hiding inside that category? What have they experienced? What does the institution say it values, and what do people actually feel? Through strategic partner Share More Stories, JMI uses a research platform called SEEQ to collect personal narratives and look for patterns across them. The stories are not decoration for a slide deck. They are raw material for segmentation and decisions.

Virginia Tourism’s work with Black travelers is the cleanest example. The initial problem was relevance: the state wanted to be more attractive and useful to a growing travel market that tourism advertising had often under-prioritized. But “Black travelers” was not yet a strategy. Story sessions with people inside and outside Virginia surfaced different needs, values and personality traits. The research produced four traveler segments - four ways of deciding where to go and what would make a place feel welcoming - rather than one demographic blob.

Those findings fed the Heart & Soul campaign, which celebrates Black creators, places and culture across Virginia. The campaign later received a national Mercury Award for digital marketing. The instructive part is not the trophy. It is what failed first: the category itself. A single label concealed four different motives. The work improved when the researchers stopped treating identity as an answer and began treating it as the start of a conversation.

Public memory, pricedWhat does listening cost when the client is a city?

Williamsburg’s African American Heritage Trail gave the method higher stakes. The city could engineer a two-mile walking route. The difficult part was deciding what the trail would say about a history in which Black residents had too often struggled to find themselves. In 2024, the city selected JMI and Share More Stories to work with an advisory committee and the wider community. They interviewed descendants, gathered historical material, invited feedback and shaped the result into a narrative organized around faith, education and resilience.

Here, unusually, the cost is public. Williamsburg’s published budget assigns $98,000 to “development of narrative from personal stories” within a total trail estimate of roughly $2.75 million. That makes listening about 3.6 percent of the project. The city’s council unanimously approved the narrative in December 2024. Construction broke ground on Juneteenth 2026. The small budget line changed the meaning of every larger one: plaques, app, memorial art and concrete would now carry a story residents had helped author.

The festival testA strategy you can hear from the parking lot

JMI’s liveliest proof is the Richmond Jazz and Music Festival, which it has produced since 2010. Johnson saw Maymont, imagined a major outdoor festival and decided Richmond should not have to drive to Washington or Tidewater to hear artists of that scale. The company books performers, coordinates the production and creates the marketing. Jazz is the useful center because its family tree reaches funk, soul and hip-hop. The lineup can hold a legend and the musician who sampled that legend, then place both before a crowd that might not otherwise share a lawn.

The festival also supplies an honest failure mode. Johnson has said rainy years have made the event lose money. His response was not to pretend attendance was the only measure. A successful weekend, by his definition, means a diverse crowd enjoys itself, performers get on and off stage on time and everybody goes home safely. This is the opening question made operational. Change the definition and you change what the team protects when weather ruins the spreadsheet.

Beyond the campaignThe bridge has to carry money, too

The least photogenic part of JMI may be the most consequential. Its consulting practice designs supplier-engagement programs for major construction and corporate projects. The firm says it has helped facilitate more than half a billion dollars in spending with small, women-owned and minority-owned businesses. That work sits beside corporate-responsibility strategy, workforce development, executive coaching and public-affairs support. In other words, JMI can help an institution tell a story about inclusion, then move down the hall and examine whether its supply chain behaves accordingly.

That is the firm’s competitive position. A large advertising agency may offer deeper media scale. A research specialist may bring more methodological machinery. An event producer may be optimized for gates, stages and riders. JMI’s advantage appears when the problem crosses those borders - when research must earn trust, creative must express it and implementation must make it visible. Public agency listings put typical work above $10,000 and hourly rates in the $100-$149 range, though JMI itself publishes no rate card.

The approach has conditions. It asks the client to tolerate discovery before deliverables and to let community testimony alter the plan. It is a poor fit for a buyer who wants the cheapest asset by Friday, a leadership team seeking the appearance of consultation, or an institution unwilling to change policy, budget or behavior after the research arrives. Listening without authority becomes theater. JMI’s best cases work because someone on the client side can do something with what was heard.

Thirty-three years after its founding, JMI remains a relatively compact independent firm in Richmond. That scale may explain both the range and the intimacy of the work. The same company can worry about a physician-facing trade-show animation, career-site traffic, a descendant’s memory and whether a singer hits the stage on time. The common product is alignment: between promise and action, institution and audience, the success named at the start and the result visible at the end.