Stewart Gandolf
Hello, everyone. Welcome. I'm Stewart Gandolf. I'm CEO of Healthcare Success. And I have already had somebody raise their hand. I'll take a look at that. Or somebody can look for me. I'm CEO of Healthcare Success. Today, we're going to talk about how to build an exceptional health care brand. I'm going to talk to you some housekeeping in just a moment and talk about what to expect today.

Stewart Gandolf
But first, I'm pleased to mention that we have a partnership with Tim De Cou and his team over at Hardesty. And so they are sponsors of today's webinar. So Tim told people about our people, a little bit about your company and in the Orange County Network, and then we'll get straight to the webinar.

Tim De Cou
Well, welcome everybody. Thank you for attending today's event. Next slide. I'm Tim De Cou. I'm the founder of Orange County Healthcare Financial Network, and I'm also the managing partner of Hardesty. Health care is about 50% of our practice. We are a national C-suite management solutions and executive search firm. Next slide. OC HFM is really designed for information sharing in the health care space.

Tim De Cou
The experience of our partners and team really is covers a broad section of health care settings, whether it be device manufacturing, life sciences, hospital patient services, medical groups, surgical centers, etc.. Next slide. The goal of Orange County Health Care Financial Network, or CHF, and as we refer to it, has always been innovation, integration, health care trends, Best practices.

Tim De Cou
For the last 15 years, we've tried to deliver what's interesting in health care to help us all sort of stay ahead of the curve. Next slide, The Hardesty We are an executive management team and we're typically the role that we play is we're who our clients call when the company is going into a critical period and they have some gaps in their team.

Tim De Cou
Or maybe it's a situation they've never dealt with and we can come in on a flexible basis to offer what we call readiness engagements, prepping the company for sale or to scale or for an acquisition integration. Or maybe it's a go to market strategy. The services we provide are nationally. We've worked in over 40 states. We have over 40 partners across the country, really more on a virtual platform below.

Tim De Cou
We're based here in offices in Irvine and we have probably in our database over 10,000 resources that sort of refer to us as we're an operators tool. We're not a consulting company. We step in to help fix the problem on a flexible basis. Next slide. The the roles we fill are really across the C-suite, and we'll go deeper into some of the more technical areas.

Tim De Cou
But the the objective is that you get into a situation, you help where we're there to work with you. Next slide and then the next slide and then happy to introduce Healthcare Success. You know, Stewart, Gandalf and Brett Maurer, I look forward to today's presentation right.

Stewart Gandolf
Thanks, Tim, and thanks for being a partner and a friend. And again, Tim's work is in the financial side and I see this drive a lot of slides actually. They work nationally and they have an Orange County fashion network. I'm sure they would welcome members from other outside the area as well. It's more of a study group. Excuse me, I'm losing my voice.

Stewart Gandolf
I'm Stewart. I'm CEO of Healthcare Success. We are a national integrated agency. We do nothing but work in health care. We are truly integrating, meaning that today's topic is about branding. It's one of our very good areas of expertise. We are also certainly known as a digital marketing agency and well as on the strategy side. So we work nationally and that actually today's attendance reflects this a little bit.

Stewart Gandolf
We have on the call today quite a wide range of folks. The people that are on this call today can be from literally attendee list earlier and where people are still joining it looks like as well. We have people from device manufacturing, pharma, SAS health systems and a lot of some private equity people as well as multi-location providers.

Stewart Gandolf
So a broad mix and this pretty much matches the people we work with. That's relevant because this is a pretty challenging crowd because you have so many different levels of experience with branding. So we're going to talk at the high level, at the mid level and the entry level throughout this, and hopefully we'll find good content for everybody.

Stewart Gandolf
We also, the folks on the call include, you know, many people, executives, CEOs and marketers. So at any rate, we're excited to work with you on this call today. And I brought along today one of the members of our branding team. Brat is an amazing brander and he's going to be talking about the design side. Brett, you want to say about your background just quickly as I jump back?

Brett Maurer
Yeah, really quickly. I've been doing branding for about the last 20 years. I started in New York doing pure pharmaceutical branding for the most part, and since then I've come out west where I've worked on multiple marketing teams, including Invisalign. But that's what people nowadays, but online tech as well as a lot of other internal teams and agency side.

Brett Maurer
So I like to think that I have the best of both worlds when I approach branding, but it's always tricky. So that's why I guess.

Stewart Gandolf
I should mention too, our firm has about 40 specialists all in their areas of expertise. Bret is one of the people in our design and branding team. We have multiple teams doing different things and maybe some will get me the rest of them. So today I'm going to talk about really what is the brand, why does it matter?

Stewart Gandolf
We're going to talk about the brand development process and how it works. We're going to share some examples with you as well, and we will have a Q and A, So the way we also at the Q&A, if you have questions, feel free to add them to the chat. And you can also add in there, for example, what's your why are you attended?

Stewart Gandolf
They would be a fun sort of icebreaker for us. I am proud since we're leading and I'll be reading the chat very much while I'm speaking, but once we get to the Q&A section will respond. Secretary to ask questions or make comments there and let's get going. So the first question is what is a brand? And this is an amazing question because even I'm a marketer is people you would think I would be more familiar with the ins and outs of a brand.

Stewart Gandolf
The not everybody's really clear on when a brand actually is. So I'm going to try to make this a little easier for everybody. The if you look at the definitions of branding, it's one of those and there's some art and science here. So there's is sort of a Rorschach test. Different people have different viewpoints about a brand. So I'm going to start with some quotes.

Stewart Gandolf
So your brand is a story unfolding across all customer touchpoints. Those are really strong words chosen carefully in story and all customer touchpoints. The brand is a living entity and it's a rich and are undermined to a degree over time. The product of a thousand small adjusters may recognize my client. They're Walt Disney changed and a whole bunch of other things that my client has done out of your brand is the sum total of all experiences your customers have with you.

Stewart Gandolf
This is a definition I've been using for a while. I'm not sure if I made this one up or read this somewhere, but this is a really good idea. So it's important to recognize that a brand is much bigger than just the marketing. The brand is the entire experience that the patient or consumer health care professional has with you.

Stewart Gandolf
I often talk about when I'm speaking live about what my experiences in the past, and I've walked into a hospital and I got that right on the entryway of our grand opening. Nobody cleaned it up for a couple of hours. I've seen bloody bandages in the parking lot. All these things are part of a brand. So it's the way you answer the phone, the way patients are taking care of or how the device actually performs.

Stewart Gandolf
All these things are touchpoints. And of course the marketing part is great because at least you have control or better control over that. So the so again, I'm thinking this through as the product or service you deliver what you stand for, what's you know, how do you communicate, what does it look like? So it's much larger than most people realize.

Stewart Gandolf
And we talk about creating a strong brand, delivering a positive, consistent emotional experience. And that's the side really is that consumers will form their own opinions. Thank you very much. But you can do a lot to influence them in a positive way on both an intellectual level and an emotional level about your business. Now, if you walk away with nothing us today, a brand is not a logo.

Stewart Gandolf
A brand is not a logo. A logo is an expression of the brand. The name of the logo are part of the identity. Call the brand identity and brand will be speaking about this. And I've even heard marketing people that are professionals refer to the brand as the logo, because not the brand is much, much larger. The identity is a piece of that that should be strategic, well thought through and well crafted, both with our point of view as a design point of view as well as a word or coffee point of view.

Stewart Gandolf
So when we talk today about the brand process and how to create a brand which is relevant today is about is that the best brands? We are a collaboration with strategy, with messaging, design, all working together to create a platform that can be that is meaningful today, tomorrow and really indefinitely. And so that's what this is all about.

Stewart Gandolf
How do we access all all these pieces together? And we're going to be using some examples and talking about branding. And I recognize that on the call today, we probably have people that are, you know, some of them may be a venture capital startup. One is so they don't have any brand at all. Most of you probably already have a name or a logo, but what do we do next?

Stewart Gandolf
How do we interpret that brand? How do we grow that brand? All these things are valid questions. And one thing to think through is that there's a continuum here in our and branding. So there you can enter at different stages and with different levels of detail. So one of the questions is you go home and convince your colleagues that you need to invest in the brands.

Stewart Gandolf
Well, why do you need a break? Right. That's a valid question. Like, why do I even care about this story? I'm a guy or I'm a CEO, and that's just marketing. Who? Well, I mean, you made it to the webinar Save US Care a little, right, if you're listening to this. But the let's talk about some value of brands.

Stewart Gandolf
So the number one branding does give your business a competitive edge by differentiating itself. So it's standing for something compared to the sea of competitors are out there by building an effective brand means that you are by definition differentiated, and the stronger your brand is, the more differentiated you will be. Interestingly, people refer to and they share in this world of social media brands they're passionate about.

Stewart Gandolf
So, you know, not every brand has that passion. Literally today I was on a call. We just had to really nice new engagements that we're working on with people that were referred to us both by the same person. They're passionate about our business and interestingly, the person who referred them, we haven't met. So they're they're familiar with our work by reputation.

Stewart Gandolf
That's what it's fantastic, right? We've built a brand very carefully over the years and people are sharing a passion about our brand. Some of them are our customers, but some are people that don't even know us, and that's awesome. Branding allows you to actively shape your reputation. So in especially from the provider world of the practice world or, you know, addiction treatment or hospitals, there's a lot of variables and touchpoints that patient has.

Stewart Gandolf
So a lot of that's very hard to control at the executive level, right? Depending on the day the patient's the day, what is the staff interaction, whether the doctor interaction, whether the diagnosis and all of that. But branding does allow you to actively shape that reputation proactively. Not everything is in your control, but if you're a control freak like me, chances are you want the things that can be in your control to go well.

Stewart Gandolf
Consumers and doctors and other CPAs trust reputable brands. That's just a fact. People are much more likely to choose a reputable brand trust, a reputable brand, and that happens through a lot of work and a lot of investments. As you may know, people pay more for, you know, to me, luggage than regular luggage. People pay more for Mercedes and other kinds of cars.

Stewart Gandolf
People pay more for established, well-respected brands. And again, just a fad for branding as a way of taking you from a generic sort of me to ism that's cool to being able to be something special and branded businesses are a whole lot more valuable. So this chart over here on the left I haven't referred to yet is actually from Kantar Media.

Stewart Gandolf
They do a brand value summary every year. These are the ten leading brands in the world. And so if you can see here, Apple with 880 billion brand. So what I did was I went and checked the market cap just to see what's the market cap. And it turns out that the brand value of Apple is essentially a third of its market cap.

Stewart Gandolf
That's amazing. Now, I think Apple's a great discussion point here because Apple has fantastic marketing, but marketing it for those of you that may remember marketing, going online is just what it includes. The price, product, place and promotion costs. Those are the four. So the product is fantastic, right? And so it's much bigger than just even the marketing.

Stewart Gandolf
It's the entire experience of Apple, the Apple store, the phones, the computers, all of it. That Apple world that they've created, that Apple universe, which is why they're not the most valuable company. What I think they are, they're very close. They're not why they attack Google. They're also as roughly around a third in terms of market cap. So brand has massive value, which means that it is and this is something for Steve Forbes that your brand is the single most important investment you can make in business.

Stewart Gandolf
So when people ask me how much the brand is going to cost, it depends, right? It depends on the complexity and number of steps we need to take. But it is a serious investment. It's the kind of thing that, you know, when we have clients with more modest budgets, we try to work around it and find ways of making it work.

Stewart Gandolf
We have clients who say, No, this is really important. I want to do this right. I can do that too. But it is an investment. But it is the most important investment. Know by the end of this, if you're all inspired and you think you want to do this, you want to find out more, talk to us and we'll give you a sense of what it might look like for your particular situation.

Stewart Gandolf
But it is a valuable investment. So let's talk about the process. So one of the things that different agencies use, different processes, this is ours and it's a good one to work with as a baseline and the basic steps are going to be the same however we define it. So the first step in the right and we're going to talk about this in more detail in just a moment, this is a road map of where we're going for a large part of this meeting.

Stewart Gandolf
So the discovery phase is, you know, really obvious. It's really hard to create a brand for a company you don't understand. So the discovery phase is really, really important. The strategy phase is the part where all the heavy thinking goes into work before we get start getting a creative process underway. Invention is something special and we'll talk about that in a moment.

Stewart Gandolf
The brand structure or hierarchy is another key issue out of your brand put together and then messaging the words and the visual identity. How do these all fit together? So I'm going to drill down into each of these things and talk through about how to create a successful brand. So that development, the discovery process, is really, really important.

Stewart Gandolf
And this is where we invest a lot of time. And so again, I want to use the way we do this just as a way because I can't speak to what other people are doing it. So this is how some of the things that we think through. So first of all, are we going to do research? And most, I would say even working with some pretty large brands, a lot of times they don't want it.

Stewart Gandolf
They want to skip the research phase, which is fine if they feel like they've already done it, they really know their customer. But it is something worth pausing and saying, Are we going to do qualitative research? Of course. Would be things like focus groups, quantitative research. With these surveys, we're actually able to quantify, calculate it, tabulate the results in an American fashion.

Stewart Gandolf
So qualitative and quantitative research can be really helpful in varieties places. So for example, with a medical device, we get a small once the company doing this kind of work that's relatively very focused, smaller research study on a piece of wood, they use this device with other companies when they're trying to create a brand, they want to understand the consumer point of view.

Stewart Gandolf
Sometimes it's very heavy, quantitative and qualitative research. Sometimes people will use research along the way not just to be open to discovery phase, but as a reality check for going the right direction. Or is our grant, you know, are there any unintended consequences of our in your name or is our creative approach work so research can work Well, again, it's not necessary.

Stewart Gandolf
And again, that's where some of the variability of pricing comes is depending on the complexities required. But that is something you should always consider. The competitive analysis we're going to talk about in a little while. The existing client research. And so again, like you may have to be doing new research, but a lot of times, especially with corporate clients, they already have data, they've already have surveys and they already have feedback from salespeople, they have sales sheets, they've done a lot of homework.

Stewart Gandolf
So when you're working with an agency, which by the way, if you are going to do this process, it's generally better to work with people that are experienced this. Then you really want to make sure they are fully informed. And people ask me, Well, what you guys want to see, and it's like, if you're in doubt, show it to us.

Stewart Gandolf
I'd rather have way too much of the way to go. So anything that you think would be a value about client points of view, influencer points of view. HTP points of view are important. We consider also your internal and external audiences very important. Many times we do stakeholder interviews. So for example, we may talk to their provider, their multi-location business, we talk to some of their opinion leading doctors, not all of them, not all 100 or 200 or 500 or whatever, but some ones that they usually the client knows who the thought leaders are and who needs to be involved.

Stewart Gandolf
Maybe from a political as well as a knowledge based. But or it might be referring doctors, it might be patients that would be ground level staff, the executives. We could be people outside the industry that know you. All these things are important and we do want to discover this and synthesize all this. So we have the knowledge base to make proper decisions.

Stewart Gandolf
So the strategy level we talk a lot about in the branding world, coming up with a purpose, mission, vision and values. And so usually we're handling this at the strategy phase, developing that again, if our client already has that, they're comfortable with that, that's great. We going to talk about purpose missions or the values in a little while as well.

Stewart Gandolf
Sometimes they have something they want to double check and see if it's real. Sometimes they're asking what it is. So those are all things that are worth discussing the context of the audience. In other words, how does your business fit within their larger world matters? What are your current capabilities? Is Do you have equity in your name, the what's happening in your category of these competitors?

Stewart Gandolf
So we start in the strategy process. We're looking for opportunities to think through the rational arguments as well as the emotional arguments that we're going to make for you. So this is the strategy phase. This is preceding the creative phase. We're not there yet, right? We're investing the time to do the groundwork. Sometimes we do workshops and again, workshops, you know, branding project you our branding projects.

Stewart Gandolf
Sometimes the workshops are usually not the very beginning, the process to do discovery. So we have an informed workshop, but a lot of times we'll do a workshop with key stakeholders to bring out the best thinking of the team. So we do our preparation. We lead a workshop sometimes at the, you know, relatively the beginning of the phase after discovery, sometimes a little bit later.

Stewart Gandolf
But that can be a good way to get the best thinking out of everybody. And again, this just depends on the project. So during this phase, most of you are familiar with SWOT analysis, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. It is something that we do a lot of times during this process, which by the way, the slides and the recording will be available after the meeting.

Stewart Gandolf
So you'll be able to, if you want to read this, you can find some of the slides, but this is a classic. This happens to be coming from SunTrust, but the strength at the top. And so this would be typically we look at the strengths and weaknesses or things that you can control their internal to the company and then external things would be opportunities and threats, things that you really can't control.

Stewart Gandolf
So classically strengths and weaknesses would be about your operations, why you, you know, your providers or your technology or whatever opportunities might be openings in the marketplace. Threats could be, you know, competitors or a new regulation. Keep in mind, if the chart on the left is really more of a generic driver, some of the things that come up always when we're doing this are things like legal compliance and HEPA.

Stewart Gandolf
If you're in the health system world right now, you know, if there's a big deal with Facebook and Google, there's an unforeseen threat that came real this year reimbursement, health care, consumerism, consolidation, basically referral patterns, recruiting as a big deal, safety, you know, couple of years ago, we had one of our nursing home chains had some covered deaths, as many others did.

Stewart Gandolf
So it's really important to the ground. We're thinking about your SWOT analysis, but also these are the competitors. Speaking of which, highly important to review the positioning and branding of your top 5 to 10 competitors to understand what their messaging says, what does their visual identity look like? Keep in mind your brand, your identity, your branding must break through the clutter to minimize the customer confusion.

Stewart Gandolf
And one of the things we see that people really oftentimes skip this stage, and that's really dangerous because it's so easy to end up in a sea of sameness where you look and sound and feel like everybody else. In fact, one of our potential clients is on the webinar today. Ask us about this a couple of days ago.

Stewart Gandolf
Well, how do we avoid looking like everybody else in their particular space? Everybody is copying each other. It's all corporate PR. And so his question was, how do we avoid that? And the answer to that is all this process stuff we talked about, and especially reviewing what everybody else is saying, find the essence of why you and then making sure that you're not falling in the same way as everybody else.

Stewart Gandolf
Target audiences are also vital, especially in health care. One of the things I talk about a lot is you have multiple audiences, so you have health care consumers, which maybe the patient or their family or or maybe just a consumer, right? If you're we have consumer packages or believe it could be, you know, executives on a database company.

Stewart Gandolf
But whoever the consumers are, you may have families involved. You may have is involved, you know, MDs, perhaps employees these days are often a big stakeholder or especially if you're recruiting or trying to keep that. And Google is always in the back of our mind, but not so much of the branding space. But we get to that group execution phase.

Stewart Gandolf
We need to really think about how this is going to not only get your messaging out, but be something that Google cares enough to cover. So a lot of times we talk about breaking your all those audiences out into personas, and if you're not familiar with persona, personas are essentially archetypes that we will create. And that's not going to be for a B2B client to really humanize that.

Stewart Gandolf
And look, in this case we're talking about she's female job description, industry background, type of college. She may have gone to, you know, in this case was about telehealth. So we really want to think through like, what is this persona? I typically will have four or five personas that we will be looking at. Again, it just depends on the situation, but it's really helpful to humanize those, especially in the creative crisis, because writers and artists, it's really hard to create for a crowd.

Stewart Gandolf
It's a lot easier to create for individuals. Next slide. The positioning. So the positioning is the rational appeal. The answer is why here? So I often say if you had if you said to speak to an audience face to face, you know, I used to always say, I think what is the one thing you want people to remember about you if they can only remember one thing?

Stewart Gandolf
And a lot of times I see some nervous shifting in the sea. But really that's what the essence of positioning. It's the rational appeal that answers why you now the wrap, the positioning that needs to be true, right? You know what to say or the most advanced technology. If you're not, it needs to be memorable and needs to be differentiating.

Stewart Gandolf
It needs to be compelling. And ideally, it needs to be defendable and you can be, for example, true, memorable, differentiating but not compelling. For example, you know, I'm the only left hand surgeon in town like, Well, okay, it's all true, but is that compelling? So the positioning is really an important part. Now, I want to make a really important point here.

Stewart Gandolf
Branding is so much about emotional connection, not rational. So we need both sides of the brain from left and right. But the point that I want to make here is that we often look at as positioning as the starting point. It's the it's the skeleton that we will begin building the larger emotional story. And typically that promotes the positioning.

Stewart Gandolf
You know, for example, or one of the examples I use for years is, you know, the if the positioning for a gentle dorsal was being gentle, we wouldn't use that as our tagline necessarily. Typically, it might be translated into whisper soft dentistry or something else. So you want to think of the positioning as the again, the skeleton, the starting point during the intervention process is all about when we have a chance to invent the category.

Stewart Gandolf
So for example, Tesla is one of my favorites. Tesla to not just reinvent cars. I mean, electric car is going to reinvent in cars and it made electric cars viable because the genius that whether you love him or hate him you almost had was it's all about the charging network. What makes Tesla unique and stands out from the crowd.

Stewart Gandolf
And being a Tesla owner myself, it's that charging network the fact that the range anxiety just goes away If you drive a Tesla I've driven 600 mile trips range anxiety is not an issue I worry about at all. And so when you have that opportunity to read developer category, that requires some extra thought, extra analysis, but it's certainly an exciting time.

Stewart Gandolf
This is an example of a client that we worked with that is reinventing health care there and in rural Michigan and elsewhere. And I can't go into details of this, but they are actually doing integrating health care on a mobile basis for rural underserved populations in conjunction with partnerships and so forth. So you can look them up if you want more.

Stewart Gandolf
But this was a program we created, again as a disrupter and testing in those early phases. And in this particular case, it was a great client. They had they already had done some brand work. We took their brand guidelines, interpreted them and created a marketing messaging and just help take them to the next level. And this again, this is some work we did last year, was all about bringing health care out through social, through different tactics as well.

Stewart Gandolf
The brand development process also includes the brand architecture. Brett's going to speak about that in just a moment, so I will defer to him on that. The brand messaging. I want to wrap up my piece here. So Brett's getting ready for his part. So the brand messaging that takes all of this into account and the deliverables can vary depending on the project.

Stewart Gandolf
Sometimes we're creating a brand name, which is a whole separate topic. Someday in the future here we'll do a whole webinar just on brand naming, because that's a really crucial process. Doesn't happen in every branded products project, but it does on some and it's always planned when we do the tagline tagline is essentially a sentence that describes what the business does.

Stewart Gandolf
The idea that comes from the idea of tagging along with the logo. We think about the value proposition or an elevator pitch, but here down here at the messaging pillars, oftentimes we create a call. It's called messaging and pillar or themes that the creative team will use forever more to describe a company to sell its services, to make sure that we're on the same page.

Stewart Gandolf
And we will also take that and often create brand messaging guidelines, much like Brad and his team will create brand identity guidelines. And so again, these are all parts of the process that we can do. And I just want to share and my last piece here is that when we think about your purpose, vision and mission values, this is real.

Stewart Gandolf
You know, this is for example, you can read this on the ear right now as I'm speaking here on the slides later. But, you know, the purpose for Special Olympics, what is the vision for the Alzheimer's Association, The mission or values? Mayo Clinic's values are respect, integrity, compassion, healing, teamwork, innovation, excellence, stewardship. Whereas, you know, the vision of the Alzheimer's Association is a world without Alzheimer's, Special Olympics to transform communities by inspiring people to open their minds and set include people with intellectual disabilities and anyone who's perceived as different.

Stewart Gandolf
So these are very powerful steps that make the copies and the art seeing letter. Read your.

Brett Maurer
Yes. Thank you. Yeah. So I'm going to talk about the visual design, the visual systems, if you will. Definitely. To Stewart's point, brand is a very large thing. Identity are the elements of that thing. So I'm going to zoom through some of the elements and then talk about how you really make a cohesive brand that speaks to your audience as intended.

Brett Maurer
Let's go to the next slide. Stewart, please. So the visual identity to Stewart's point is not the brand. The visual identity are the smaller things that make up the brand and can you have an identity without the brand? Can you have an identity without all the things Stewart just discussed? Absolutely. You can get a logo, you can pick fonts, you can pick color palettes.

Brett Maurer
Those things happen. A lot of times our customers, our clients come to us with those things already. So what we're talking about today is that bigger thing, right? That that larger thing, that experience across all your touchpoints, your brand. So again, just to reiterate, identity are elements that make up your brand. Let's go to the next slide. And I really think this is a really important point to make.

Brett Maurer
Inform Brand Design. Stewart just told you all of the things we do before we ever design anything, right? We have strategist, we have content writers helping us, the creative team, to understand who we're speaking to and what we're designing too is very important. There's a lot of designers who will say, This is your logo is awesome, just use it.

Brett Maurer
That's cool. If it works for you. But when you want informed design, you're taking into consideration your stakeholders, wants and desires. What is what did that positioning show you? What is the messaging trying to communicate to their users? So you know, a logo more often than not can be designed in a vacuum. An intelligent brand system cannot be.

Brett Maurer
It needs to be informed by something and needs to be informed by the perception of you. What what how are we trying to change that perception of you? How do you communicate? What is your tone? You know? Are you a fun brand? Are you a serious brand? It really depends on what our clients are looking for and and what our findings tell us that needs to be.

Brett Maurer
Let's go to the next slide. Stewart. Elements of brand design I'm sorry, brand identity again, we're talking about identity here. So logo brand architecture, we'll talk about both of these all of these actually color palettes. Typography. Typography is a tricky one, but it's as important as color and logo. How do you treat your imagery? Is it illustration? Is it photography?

Brett Maurer
Is it manipulated photography? Of course, once you cover those things, then you start to have to battle with. How does that translate into a brand? How do all these things come together to make a proper visual system kind of the interim step between the identity elements and realizing a visual system, which we will definitely talk about are your guidelines, right?

Brett Maurer
I don't want to say they're your Bible, but they're definitely your rulebook to maintain brand consistency and make sure that you're delivering on the vision for the brand and the messaging that you've worked so hard to establish with your clients, ideally. Next slide. So logo super basic, right? I always like to think of Logo as your graphic elevator pitch, right?

Brett Maurer
Yes. Your logo can be very expressive. It can definitely let people know what you do, maybe even how you do it. But at the end of the day, it's a proprietary market you own and you protect and becomes very recognizable wherever you're applying it to. It's essential. Yes. It's informed by messaging. Yes. But it doesn't really get its legs as part of a brand's system until you start to understand how to use it, when to use it, and how that into your communications, across platforms, across applications, print, digital, we all know what they are now is changing constantly.

Brett Maurer
So it's a challenge and we'll talk about that a bit later. Of course, there are various approaches to logos. Some people like have a very simple logo type, so you don't have a symbol there. People do have a symbol. Neither one is right or wrong. I think, you know, it really comes down to how you implement it and how you communicate it through your visual system.

Brett Maurer
Next, iterative design process. This this really is, I think, where good designers and good agencies really separate themselves from, Hey, I got a logo made, it's cool. Looks great. Iterative design process. It's really about working hand in hand with your client, right? Your client knows what they want or thinks they know what they want, but you can't just say what you want because it's a design that's perfect.

Brett Maurer
It's really important to work with your clients to to make sure that not just a designer who has something in mind is very happy with the product, but to make sure that it answers all those questions. That man that I'm sorry, that messaging put out there, the client needs to be as happy and confident as their mark as you are.

Brett Maurer
And this is a design process. It's not logo specific. So this applies to everything from workshops. When you initially start the discovery phase and the strategy phase with your messaging and content team to working with the designers to make sure we understand what you are looking for and what you think suits your needs while, We advise on the best ways to accommodate that.

Brett Maurer
So a big part of our job is not just designing something, it's designing something. Then going to our clients and working with them to understand if it's hitting the mark for them. While it also addresses those needs that were set out by your earlier discovery phase, if you will, with messaging and strategy. It's really important, and I think that's what sets great designs apart, is that it's not designed for design, so it's informed design that has been worked on as in a partnership with your clients.

Brett Maurer
Let's go to the next suit. This is just a great example. Plasma source is a recent client of ours, a very cool client. They're in the blood plasma donation industry vertical, if you will, But this is a great example. Our design team, which I think is great, you know, we touch base with our strategy, we get the messaging, we get the findings that they came up with.

Brett Maurer
We definitely have our own workshop with the clients to understand what they like, what works, you know, blood plasma with obviously enough maybe you don't want to use red is a bit on the nose and a bit scary. So this is just a great example, really an early, early passive looking at logos, trying to address those questions and those needs that the client have.

Brett Maurer
But we're not dialing in quite yet. We're casting a pretty wide net and we're we're trying to make each of these marks speak to what we found in our findings and our and our learnings, if you will. But you can see that doesn't mean that you're really dialed into something yet. You still have the creative exploration here. We get into subject cavity, which is very challenging.

Brett Maurer
As you all know, when you get into design by committees, there's a lot of opinions. But that being said, we don't like to put anything forward that is missing the mark. So if you're seeing it, we think it's on the mark and we can be subjective within the space. Ideally, you have a great conversation at this phase. You figure out where to dial and designs and where to start focusing your attention so that we can all be happy with the end result.

Brett Maurer
Next, again, another example, a really nice dermatology client cutting edge technology. Really, really an industry leader. But at the time their mark had become stagnant. It was old, it was outdated. It really did not speak to how advanced and current and on trend. Trend is probably a bad word, but you know what they were trying to communicate. So again, here you see a wide a wide exploration of, well, let's start here and then we'll narrow it down from there.

Brett Maurer
Speaking with our clients, speaking with our strategy team. So again, these are just two really simple visuals of the initial exploration that starts conversations and starts to help us funnel narrowed down to where we want to end up with a strong mark that works for all of our needs. And once you have a logo, that's great. But in health care especially, there's a lot of things to be considered.

Brett Maurer
Maybe you can, and more than likely you can have a logo that works for everything. Of course, larger hospitals have different departments A lot of practices may have multiple practices in multiple areas, multi-location, obviously. So how do you address that in your brand system? Yeah, you still maintain your logo, but you need to speak to those divisions, those different locations so the user can understand that when they see something in San Diego, it's related to something in Los Angeles, for instance.

Brett Maurer
So brand architecture becomes really important. We're going to zoom through kind of the big core types of brand architecture here really quick nets, and you'll recognize a lot of these examples. Again, as I mentioned in chat, we will be sharing out this deck so you can take your time with these. But I'm just going to touch on each of these really quickly.

Brett Maurer
Branded house is the first thing that got FedEx. It's the same logo everywhere, but they use a different descriptor and a different color to differentiate their offerings. Ground trade networks for in this case. But again, the overarching uniform thing here is that FedEx brand that doesn't change the description and the colors change over time. You build up your users familiarity with that.

Brett Maurer
They if they use FedEx that often, they start to recognize the differences. They know Orange means the umbrella corporation, they know green means ground. So probably the safest approach, I think this is largely where we live. A lot of times we're talking about multi-location practices, very straightforward, very brand specific approach to brand architecture. Next, the endorsed brand gets a little funkier.

Brett Maurer
In this case, we're we're looking at Kellogg's and you see their their brands change Dramat Oakley across their applications. They have a lot of products. But on that box in that logo lock up, you always have that corporate umbrella brand that somewhere letting you know this is Kellogg's. Kellogg's endorses this brand because it's ours. So you get a lot more variety here, maybe initially a bit less brand equity, but you're still keeping your name top of mind to those customers.

Brett Maurer
So if they're paying attention, they recognize, yeah, Kellogg's makes this, but you have a very different logo to play with. And each of these sub brands may have a very different visual system, but at the end of the day, it is anchored in the Kellogg's brand Subbrands. We all know Apple is a big Apple. You know, they do a great job playing with typography, keeping it uniform, but they let their brands shift a little bit.

Brett Maurer
You know, some use the Apple Watch, Apple TV. Those are part of the brand name. But they abbreviate with Apple where iPad, iPhone is more of a standalone brand. We all know it's Apple. They they really use their typography in a smart way to make it consistent. But they are all ultimately subbrands that share a common visual language, mostly typography, but it's a little bit less specific, depending on the brand application, the product application, if you will.

Brett Maurer
And then you have the house of Brands, which is a whole different animal unto itself. Designers love them because you can always do whatever you want, but largely if you look at the brands under new well, I'm not sure how to pronounce that. Apologies. There's no indication that these are part of the new Apple brand. I'm sure there is in the fine print.

Brett Maurer
But largely each of these brands is a brand unto itself, very different looks and feels very different visual systems. And it's less important for this company to be associated with that. In fact, it may be better if it's not. So this is almost a hidden corporate brand, if you will, and you let each brand live on its own and speak to its demographics, its targets, all that jazz as they need to.

Brett Maurer
So it's more of a challenging thing. It's a much bigger animal to deal with when you're talking about design and consistency. But they don't happen often. But it seems like when they do, they become very big things in spite of their corporate. And these are just very simple example. Well, not very simple, but these are some of our examples.

Brett Maurer
Going back to what I was talking about initially, you know, we deal with a lot of multi-location practices. We deal with a lot of health care. I don't want to say practices, companies that do have different departments. So in this case, we rebranded as Terra, I believe we did the naming as well, and we came up with this really beautiful, optimistic corporate mark on the left as Tara Cancer care.

Brett Maurer
Of course, when you get into practice, you need to delineate your departments. Radiation oncology is the example here. So you need to start thinking about how your logo works when you have those requirements in case we developed a very nice lock up that just let them switch out the descriptor that attached to the core logo and that's a very simple brand architecture here.

Brett Maurer
Going back to what I was speaking to before, we have a multi-location practice. How do you identify that location in case a very simple descriptor, the logo never changes, but your logo lock up needs to change to accommodate that additional information, I'm going to zoom over these really quickly, but they're all important. You could write a book on all of them, color, typography and imagery.

Brett Maurer
These things really come into play of course, you need you need to be consistent. You know, Apple uses the same typeface everywhere. You know, your colors are heavily dictated by your brand guidelines. Your type and your imagery treatments are important as well. Are using photography, illustration, iconography. We'll touch base on these a little bit later when we're talking about visual systems to show you how they apply to your brand system rather than just the individual elements.

Brett Maurer
Again, brand guidelines that I think are the next slide here. Brand guidelines are your Bible, if you will. This is a good example. I mentioned plasma source earlier. This this is a brand guidelines we just wrapped up and largely this is the way to protect your brand. If if you're a large company, especially if you have an interior marketing department with designers, Lucky you.

Brett Maurer
That's awesome. They're probably pretty familiar with the brand. If you're using vendors and partners or agencies to realize other types of communication. This comes in really handy to make sure that your brand is protected. You have do's and don'ts. You know, you have ways to tell designers or agencies what your brand is able to do and what should never happen with their brand.

Brett Maurer
Of course, here you're outlining typography, use logo application. What happens when you have an avatar from the logo, more importantly, color palette you see here and I'll talk about this a little bit more soon, but we really try to overdo it on color palettes, and that's largely tied to another topic called the Living Brand. I'll speak to towards the end of my little run here, and I'm going to try to speed up.

Brett Maurer
I know we're running out of time. Visual systems. This is what brand is all about. In my mind. Everything else is identity. Visual systems is bringing all those elements together your logo, your imagery, your time and saying, how do we represent ourselves, whether it's impaired, social, whether it's in print, everything should be uniform. When people interact or experience your brand, it should feel like your brand space.

Brett Maurer
They should recognize that, especially once they get familiar with their brand. So it's these small things that you can do to really tie all of your communications together with a visual system so that people understand when they see you, Oh, this is you. Apple does a great job. You can think of their old ads and their new ads.

Brett Maurer
It's always very simple. So it's very clean. It's the same typeface, it's the same hierarchy of typefaces. It's usually the same grid and layout. But this is what branding is all about, how you're communicating to your audiences. Next step. And that first was just setting the prefacing. Rather these times Synergy Gen-X is a testosterone replacement therapy TRT client that we've done really great work with a really great partner.

Brett Maurer
And I just wanted to show you this slide and the next slide in a minute, Stewart, to show you go back to show you how different a visual system can be applied. The logo never changes in these applications. The color palette is largely the same, but depending on how you treat your typography, how you treat your imagery and how you develop visual elements, you start to establish a consistent way of communicating to your clients where they start to recognize this is synergistic.

Brett Maurer
So this is a really great example. This is one look at what a visual system could be. And if you go to the next slide again, using the same brand elements, look how different it could be because of how you're choosing to use those brand elements to communicate. One is bolder, simpler. This one is more direct. The last one is more aspirational, a little bit more dependent on inspirational photography, where this is much more of a graphic approach.

Brett Maurer
Both are playing with the X and center Gen X. But again, we're not changing the logo. We're considering how we use and apply the identity into a system across all elements. And this is really what brand is about. To me, everything else is identity, but really the linear in how you communicate and how you use those elements in a very consistent way is what visual systems and brand is all about.

Brett Maurer
Another really important thing, especially in health care, if you spend all this time developing this beautiful, warm, inviting and comfortable brand you're making, Plasma Horse was a great example. The approach there was we don't want to be a cool clinic. We want to feel more like a boutique. We want you to feel like you're walking into your living room or a cafe and you can relax while you're getting our services and environments mean a lot.

Brett Maurer
Stewart mentioned the rat on a doorstep earlier. I haven't had that severe of an example, but it's really a big disconnect. If if your online presence in your ads, if you're young and youthful and warm and inviting and you walk into a clinic that feels cold and scary. So experiential design and environmental design, especially when you have brick and mortar, mean a lot.

Brett Maurer
It goes from everything from signage to your interior designs to how people navigate your space. If you have large hospital, how on earth do I get to the emergency room? You got to make that clear. And those are all opportunities to bring your brand into these designs. So let's go to the next door. This is a good example about Pomona Valley Health.

Brett Maurer
Here. You're going to see a lot of things. You're going to see almost all brand systems. On the left, you see a new identity. This is in the desert in the west. You see that gradient, the references that below you see a quick color palette and some avatars. And on the right you see us starting to think about how we can apply that brand, that identity to your building.

Brett Maurer
Next slide. Her What does that look like inside? How do people find their way around? Again, these are branding opportunities. Well, I think a lot of people in health care leave this up to the building or what's there, what's preexisting or they put up signs, but you can really do cool design that really makes your environment feel more unique, more special, more on target for what your brand represent.

Brett Maurer
Again, on the left here you have a nice brand architecture. This was a tricky one. There's some pretty big names here, so we're just working through how we delineate these different centers to the client. That's in synergy. I mentioned that before. I showed you some of the brand work we have been working on the working on for them here.

Brett Maurer
Again, we're thinking, how does that brand apply to your environment? You don't want to come to get testosterone therapy or hormone therapy, which is what they also offer and walk in and everything is large, burly, bearded men. Now you're in hormones, so and weight loss. So you're dealing with both men and women at different stages of their life.

Brett Maurer
And how do you start to communicate that when you walk in? In this case, we were for really poppy look, really emphasize in the new brand work we had done. And again, this feels much more current and on trend than walking into a maybe all beige wall room. Next. Stewart, I'll try to go faster and then we're in a time.

Brett Maurer
And last but not least, you have to protect and nurture your brand. Once the design is done, once the strategy is done, you can't stop paying attention to it. It's very easy for a brand to get watered down or scattered across communications. Next, please. And that leads right into something that we really ascribe to here. The idea of a living brand.

Brett Maurer
Yes, you should protect your brand, but if we're talking about social networks and stopping someone when they scroll and maybe your color palette is very subdued and quiet, you need to be louder. There. You need to differentiate yourself. And so those are the times when you need to look at your brand and reevaluate it. Should I refresh my brand?

Brett Maurer
Should I extend my brand? Is my color palette letting me use the best practices that we all know exist going forward. So the idea of a living brand is just maybe, definitely protect their brand, but be open to letting your brand shift a bit to accommodate success. Conversions and and new technologies and platforms, if you will. So that's what I have, I believe.

Brett Maurer
Stewart, do you want to think back over.

Stewart Gandolf
Some of you may feel like they've been drinking out of a firehose here, so I appreciate your attention. And we did actually solve this about on time. We've got a couple of minutes left over for comments while Brad, you can read through those real quickly and what's up with Tim. I'll give you ten second commercial to finish up on your so yeah.

Tim De Cou
Just wanted to thank everyone for attending and our next event is and I think I see Jenna the CEO on the on the call is going to be pocket hour and I think that will be very good presentation October 27th it's a video chat nursing platform.

Stewart Gandolf
Excellent. Good day. All right. So let's analyze it.

Brett Maurer
So I have a great question from JB and it is oftentimes a brand is recognized by its when one company changes its logo where they risk changing their DNA and part of their brand, You need to do it strategically. If yes, how and if I could start that answer and maybe Stewart could finish it. Yes, a logo is very valuable depending on the brand equity you've built up that brand value, it can be a dangerous thing to change your logo.

Brett Maurer
A lot of times is, in these situations a better approach, especially if you have a lot of brand equity, is to refresh your brand. So you you can you can evolve your brand, maybe you update your logo to be more current, maybe you update your colors. But like the synergy work I was showing you, that logo never changed even even though their communications changed dramatically.

Brett Maurer
So in those situations we try to explore can we refresh the brand? Can we change some of the brand attributes, the identity elements to make it more current and make it feel more fresh? One that stands out. Stewart mentioned Tesla earlier. We all know Twitter turned into X. That was a giant loss of brand value, just massive. And Elon Musk is going to Elon Musk it of course, but that's hard because now people are still calling it Twitter, but it's X.

Brett Maurer
And in that situation, there might have been an opportunity to refresh the Twitter brand if you didn't want to burn. And rather than renaming the brand so that that's a dangerous one because a brand value is so high, if your brand hasn't found a foothold, if you're pretty new and you have a logo you brought, it's much easier to say, Should we rebrand?

Brett Maurer
But in that case, I think largely you're keeping a similar logo or lineage mark, or you're just updating elements of that to let it work in the real world.

Stewart Gandolf
So yeah, I would add to that the I think Brett's exactly right. One of the key issues is how do we how valuable is it? Because a lot of times on the provider side, for example, I've seen people overestimate their brand. I remember once I was working with a multi-location provider, cancer provider, Texas, and they just assumed everybody in town knew who they were.

Stewart Gandolf
And my random sampling. On the way to the client meeting, I asked seven random people and nobody had ever heard of them. So it was that's not usually the kind of research we do, but you can do quantitative research to help get a sense of what you're about to get. And then when you do anything that's a major and you do have a brand reputation, this is very, very thoughtful, very, very thoughtful.

Stewart Gandolf
And then there's a net. It's just so big that, you know, the execution of the name and the logo and then all the cost of all the facilities and then the websites. And how do you do that? It's just a big, big project. And I think don't do it. Just be very thoughtful.

Brett Maurer
Next door, I have one more question. If we can just jam the time a bit. That I think is a very good question.

Stewart Gandolf
We've got the students are hanging off a little longer. It's okay. We're not going to. Okay.

Brett Maurer
And I think this is a great question to use to our our facility runs two clinics, a critical care hospital, nursing home and a daycare should each have their own brand or is it more effective to have them under one umbrella BRAND?

Stewart Gandolf
Okay. So that's exactly it's kind of like asking a patient, Doctor, I've got cancer, which kind of chemo. So I guess we haven't done the homework, right? So our caveat this to say we haven't done the proper exam diagnosis and a patient history to junk to the treatment plan. But if I had to say so, that's the kind of stuff we do and the brand process to go look at the pros and cons they use that oftentimes not one answer.

Stewart Gandolf
So for example, I mentioned we had a covered death of one of our clients nursing homes. In that case, they had a house of brands. They literally had 58 locations, 50 different brands. So the good news there was that when somebody died or this number of patients died, there it was looks it was focused on that single location.

Stewart Gandolf
Nobody else knew it because it was one brand. So as opposed to the whole franchise. So that's where we've seen that. For example, one of the clients we worked with when they back when they had four locations, now has 900 or something Pacific Dental has that they actually only have 900 different dental offices and that provides the advantage of being able to.

Stewart Gandolf
One of the things it does is it feels very community and too it helps protect the brand. There's not the master brand from, you know, whatever happens is on the ground. And the flip side of that that's very, very expensive to promote is very, very confusing. So it takes a lot of scaling. So in your case then I would say that a lot of times we would probably do a hybrid approach like we did with the stair.

Stewart Gandolf
And by the way, we didn't name that. We did that approach just before Brett joined us. So we did do the naming there and that was after our comprehensive plan. But we did have a Sarah radiation oncologist, Sarah metaphor in college, etc., transfusion or whatever. And so that oftentimes is a good way of doing it. And it sounds like a great project.

Stewart Gandolf
It's exactly the kind of stuff that requires a strategy and a creative execution to pull that one off successfully. And again, I just have to stress it really requires some discussion. There's I can argue it both ways. And so at the end of the day, it comes down to the client situation.

Brett Maurer
Yeah, and I agree with all of that. You know, looking looking at those two clinics you mentioned critical care versus home, nursing home and day care. Those are very different worlds. So the communications become much more challenging when you're trying to address it with a unified brand, especially when you get into those brand systems. So that may be one of those times when a branded house, you know, like Stewart said, a quieter corporate brand with more specific subbrands becomes more useful.

Stewart Gandolf
That's probably that's general. I would lean, by the way, the idea of having completely a house of brands where everything is divergent is a little harder because there's also that nobody knows that you're part of the same system. And these are very common in health care. These naming issues are huge. We get too many multi-location businesses as clients and they all like, you know, for example, the gastroenterology practice, which started exactly like the other three gastroenterology practices in town, one center, one's associates, one's clinic.

Stewart Gandolf
It's all you know. So they have almost exactly the same name. So how do you differentiate, do And what we find is in those kind of cases that the providers in town refer to people by doctor names because they don't even know they don't know what the names are because they're so similar. Those are really key issues we see.

Stewart Gandolf
And Tim has a client in Arizona pain practice that has a very name that people will actually try to steal from. So these issues are real then to be very thoughtfully and strategically address any other practice. Before we go.

Brett Maurer
I have another very good one from Daniel Benjamin. Thank you. Daniel, can you speak to the analytical demographic process? The piece development of consumer I'm sorry, of consumer personal.

Stewart Gandolf
So actually, I wish my friend Robb client is our brand expert that we work with. He's the brand is not just a researcher, is a brand strategist, and we lean on heavily for this. Typically what he's doing is a lot of quantitative work to inform the persona building and so this is not really my specific area of expertise, but it can be done.

Stewart Gandolf
The key is finding the right researcher that understands this world. And that's why I love brand for this or I love Rob for those kind of projects, because while we work really well together, he handles the research part, recalibrating part.

Brett Maurer
Yeah, I think those are the questions I caught or excuse me along the way, unless I've missed any. But yeah Stewart or Tim.

Stewart Gandolf
Thanks for partnering with us on this. We're friends and you owe me a large.

Tim De Cou
Thank you all very much and we'll look forward to seeing all you at our next event next month.

Stewart Gandolf
Great. Thanks, everybody.

Tim De Cou
Everyone. Thank you.