Alex Ignacio
Good morning, everyone, at least for your West Coast folks. Otherwise, good afternoon. Today, our webinar is about creating a living healthcare brand with us here at Healthcare Success. So some quick housekeeping. We will be taking questions after the presentation. So if you have any, as we go through, please type them into the chat and we'll try to get through as many as possible at the end.
Alex Ignacio
So introducing ourselves next. I'm your moderator, Alex Ignacio, a senior, a graphic designer here at Healthcare Success. And we have Paul Knipe, our senior account director, and Brett our senior art director. We're really excited to talk about this topic today. So without further ado, let's get started.
Brett Maurer
Great. Thank you, Alex, and welcome to all of our participants. Today, we're going to talk about the living brand, which is our approach to brand and communication. It's allowing companies to more effectively reach patients and consumers across multiple channels and platforms in a pretty crowded marketplace. Starting out, we're going to begin with this beautiful quote, enough by Michael Eisner.
Brett Maurer
But it does encapsulate a lot of what we'll talk about today. Your brand isn't merely a logo and a tagline and messaging platform. It's a collection of all these things. They work together to deliver a cohesive and unified voice to the consumer. Today, we're going to recognize the limitations of traditional brand approaches and ask ourselves, Is my brand flexible enough to be successful in this world?
Brett Maurer
Multiple platforms, multiple channels of communications, and again, just a very crowded marketplace. We think allowing your brand to evolve and flex across your communications probably a bit more than you've traditionally thought of branding to do really allows it to grow and to accommodate a lot of new needs that we're presented with today. When your brand comes into play here, we're going to define what a living brand is.
Brett Maurer
What are the basics? Maybe the best way to understand a living brand in theory, is to consider a tree. Your traditional brand can be thought of as the trunk, the strong and consistent foundation for all of your communications. But what happens when your brand can no longer reach new spaces when it can't find the sunlight? How do you keep growing your brand?
Brett Maurer
This is where the living brand approach becomes more important in this case. In this analogy, we'll consider the tree. The living brand would be those branches is evolution's built on the foundation of your core brand that lets you reach these new spaces. Today we're going to explore how to utilize a living brand and recognize the limitations of your core brand system and when to transition into a new way of thinking about your brand.
Brett Maurer
So let's go ahead. Let's just consider traditional brand systems versus a living brand system. By definition, most traditional brands systems are fairly static. You start out with a pretty hard and fast set of rules that dictate what you can do, where you can do it and how you do it. You may have a set of primary colors. That's your brand.
Brett Maurer
Everything's black and white, for instance. We'll look an example like that later, and that's great. But then when we start talking about these new technologies and platforms, let's let's consider a lot of social networks. Let's consider your social advertising initiatives. How do you stop that user from scrolling? How do you make them notice you? And how do you stand out among the clutter, among the loudness of these feeds?
Brett Maurer
And sometimes your brand, even if it's an effective and well thought out design system, can't really accommodate those best practices, Those things that we've learned through AB testing and user experience, what what can really make a big difference in your user engagement and really, again, make your brand stand out. The living brand, on the other hand, builds on your static brand and it says it's okay to let it flex.
Brett Maurer
If we've realized, for instance, that on our landing page, corner actions are engaging much more often. If they're in a ocher color, maybe you should consider branching out from your brand color palette to accommodate those things that we've found to be tried and true and really do help the user get to you get to your business and see your business.
Brett Maurer
That's really the basic difference. It doesn't negate your existing brand. It just is a theory that allows you to change your brand to complement the core brand system in new ways that work more effectively for you. Go to the next slide. What we're going to do here is we're going to look at a few some more well-known examples of living brand applications, as well as some of the examples from our portfolio to talk about creating new brands with the living and brand approach in mind.
Brett Maurer
This is a really interesting example, and of all the companies in the world, if you said who's going to be leading the cutting edge of branding and really letting their brand change the most, the last place I would ever think of is Gap. But here we are in this instance, we all know Gap. If you're not familiar with y z y that is an abbreviation for Yeezy better known as Kanye West West brand, if you will.
Brett Maurer
And it's an interesting dynamic here because Gap, of course, is a very well-known apparel brand. Yeezy is a bit higher fashion apparel brand with very different markets and different audiences, but they work together on a collaboration. In this case, you can see Gap decided to carry a line of Yeezy. And as a result, rather than just having the Gap logo, the Gap branding when the Yeezy line is available at Gap, Gap actually allows its whole logo to change to the Yeezy logo.
Brett Maurer
In this case, both brands are giving up parts of their known brand system to better engage with each other's audiences. Yeezy abbreviated under Y's divides maintained the three lettered logo type and of course the container of gap is maintained. You don't see this often is almost a brand takeover, if you will. But again its gapping alleging that it may be beneficial to us to let our brand change, maybe not permanently, but as needed and and really captivate people, bring in new audiences.
Brett Maurer
And the same goes for Yeezy opens up his brand to other audiences that may not be as excited about it. So it's a really interesting case study. You don't see logos change that often, especially like this. Pretty, pretty fascinating in my opinion. It could go to the next Google we're all very familiar with. This is probably the granddaddy of living brands, if you will.
Brett Maurer
Again, this is a very known but known brand, a lot of brand value. And in practice, they do have a very strict brand guidelines how you utilize their brand, what their logos can do. But we all know what a Google Doodle is. This is almost common vernacular at this point. On their application. They let their logo change, they let it shift, they let it speak to different days, events, people, and they have a lot of fun with it.
Brett Maurer
Sometimes, as you see on the bottom row here, you can't even read the word Google on that. But because you're on their application, you're in their space, they can kind of control their brand in that way while further engaging their customers. You know, this this has been water cooler talk among designers for years. It's just a very cool example of a really established brand that has no problem playing with their brand, letting it change, letting it shift to again delight users, engage users and even educate users in this case.
Brett Maurer
So this is a really well known example of a brand that is a very serious brand, but allows itself to flex to, to, to do more things with that brand and again, to get the word out about Google on the brand now unnecessary, but it worked at the time. We're going to move on here. This is actually one of our clients from our portfolio and we just looked at a couple of brands that were established.
Brett Maurer
We all know them. But how does a living brand apply when you're creating new brands? Largely the idea is you want to plan for the unknown. You don't you don't want to develop a brand system that's so static and so specific that it can't flex in the future to accommodate new channels, new platforms. And as a result, we find ourselves building much more robust initial brand packages.
Brett Maurer
As you can see here, our color palettes are pretty large. They try to anticipate all of the areas this brand will go to, all the platforms that we've applied to, and largely we just give it a bit more flex. Your logo isn't necessarily always green, it can be blue. A lot of your primary colors can shift out and we try to anticipate color palettes and imagery and logos that can be applied across multiple channels in multiple ways.
Brett Maurer
And it still relates back to this core based brand. Most of our guidelines do wrap up allowing for that additional flexibility to be in place with plasma source. You know, it's the idea is it's a it's a blood donation, blood plasma donation center. And traditionally those have been very clinical transactional environments here. We wanted to make it more comfortable.
Brett Maurer
We wanted to transition into more of a boutique feel to make their users feel more comfortable and special. As a result, you see a lot more of these warm tones, these very natural environments. So we planned all of it to just reinvent that type of space. Again, it's allowing the brand to not be so clinical while providing you with the assets to let your communications be that or to let them be more boutique, more warm, more invited.
Brett Maurer
Really great project. We've enjoyed it very much here. Another one of our clients SynergenX. Again, this was an well, not again. Alternately, this is an existing brand that they you know, their industry was largely about big burly men with beards because their service is testosterone replacement, you know, that testosterone replacement and hormone therapy. But as they got bigger along along with us, they started to notice or realized the need that they needed to speak to a wider demographic.
Brett Maurer
They were bringing in offerings for women, hormone replacement, weight loss therapy. They wanted to transition more to a lifestyle brand to better focus on the benefits of their therapies. And so here, without rebranding and then we started exploring through their social ad designs how we could do that by letting the color palette shift a little bit, letting the typography shifted on who you're talking to, rather than all blues and heavy imagery.
Brett Maurer
And again, all men, we started thinking about whiteness and how we could speak to more people and more ambitions without necessarily changing the brand. Again, the brand stayed consistent at its core. We just let the applications of imagery, typography and color shift depending on who we were talking to and where we were talking to. The next piece. And of course, your healthcare success.
Brett Maurer
We do like to practice what we preach as as this kind of approach to branding develop as we really worked through it and started seeing the benefits of conversion to our clients and our customers, we thought, Well, why are we doing this so what was previously previously a fairly static brand? If you see on the top right hand corner, blue and blue logo, we started letting go a little bit.
Brett Maurer
We started letting our advertising. In this case, we're looking at multiple blogs, blog posts, blog advertisements for social media, and we started letting those the content of those dictate what they looked like. The logo didn't always have to be blues. The take didn't always have to be Roboto. You know, we let those things shift to accommodate who we were talking to and again, most importantly, to get more engagement, to stand out on those really busy feeds and just to really give our customers something to look at and be intrigued by rather than the known kind of standard.
Brett Maurer
Here's a photo with a logo and a message on it. So this has been really fun. We see really good results with this. And again, it's just it's just trying to realize how we can let our brand evolve. Might it flex to better speak to those people we're trying to target? Next is in here. I just wanted to give you a scenario, if you will, a hypothetical company, just to better explain what we're talking about in this case.
Brett Maurer
Let's consider a health brand, a generic health brand, and maybe their static brand guidelines that were developed. They're very well thought out and very well balanced and work well. You know, in this case, we're going to extremes. Maybe their color is only black and white. You can use black and white, maybe a gray. Everything should be that no matter what.
Brett Maurer
You can see the standard ad on the left, some branding, that visual device of a black or gray triangle and a nice color photo. Pretty, pretty typical as far as things go. But if you go to the next slide, when you apply that to the feed, it's a busy feed. And again, you do start to struggle with, you start to compete.
Brett Maurer
You're going up against a lot of different types of ads. You know, there are certain colors that engage people more often on social media that you have better conversion rates on and you don't want to the strictness of your brand to limit how you're using these new platforms that we all have to work through and work with and compete with.
Brett Maurer
As a result, this may be a good time to step back and say, Well, let me look at best practices, let me work, look at what is converting the best on these platforms. These things are tried and true. You know, maybe, maybe Pink gives people's attention the most. And then you just have to ask yourself, is that worth letting my brand flex a bit to get more likes, to get more looks, to get more customers and patients engage with your company.
Brett Maurer
So in this case, if you go to the next slide, maybe you do incorporate that pink. Now you don't want to just add a random pink. You want to do this intentionally. You want to add something that complements your preexisting brand. It doesn't distract from it, but also lets you take advantage of the benefits of those colors that work better.
Brett Maurer
Or those messages that work better were the imagery type that works better. So if you go to the next slide, you can see how does how does that work? Like, you know, what happens to your system when you start to introduce these new elements? Obviously, it changes the esthetic quite a bit. In this case. Go back to ads.
Brett Maurer
We were thinking that would be your static brand. That's what you've always done. And the other four ads with color, you know, those are those are maybe taking advantage of what works better in these environments. A nice little play here. And again, it's a it's a it's a nod towards how do you maintain that brand integrity if you're if your brand is traditionally all black and white?
Brett Maurer
Maybe when you introduce these new color elements to get to get that attention, to get that pop in these feeds, maybe in those cases your new guidelines dictate that your image just to black and white. In this case, that ties nicely, really nicely back to your core brand, your black and white brand. So it's really this play is this way to identify alternatives to what you've done before, to really embrace what works better without ignoring your your core brand system.
Brett Maurer
Again, you want to do this with intent. You don't want to do it randomly. You know, you want to be informed by strategy and by best practices. But there's a lot to be said for not cherishing your brand elements so much that you can never change that. But you can you can never let those flex to get the best results.
Brett Maurer
Next, please. And so I'm going to hand it off to Paul here, but thank you.
Paul Knipe
We've introduced the concept of the living brand and the visual examples hopefully help a lot in bringing it to life and what that can mean visually for the brand. We'll talk more about the ingredients of what a brand should have because it's much more than just the visual expression, and we'll get to that in a moment. But it's worth highlighting a few tips around building a living brand.
Paul Knipe
First, staying relevant is essential. Any brand exists within a community. That community is comprised of key audiences people who have values, pain points, needs, having a pulse on those needs is vital. Having a good sense of what is important to these audiences and the overall community is vital to being relevant as it gets more crowded. And you think about a competitive landscape.
Paul Knipe
If your brand is static in the ways that Brett described, it can be much harder to personalize and stay relevant in that competitive, noisy marketplace and then to be a true and effective living brand, you have to be engaging part of the strategy that drives the healthcare success living brand approach with some of those content marketing and visual approaches that Brett shared is that we want to engage our audiences and depending on the topic or the issue, we can stay true to ourselves and our values.
Paul Knipe
And what makes the healthcare success brand while we also adapt and engage audiences where they are around the topics that are important to them. So staying relevant, huge for the for any living brand system. But we learn, right? We are always part of an ongoing conversation. What may work in one channel may not work in another marketing channel.
Paul Knipe
So adapting appropriately is the second big tip. It's a lot like a person. Any of us has a personality, likes, dislikes and a nature, a set of attributes that make us who we are, and a brand is the same. We don't change who we are necessarily based on where we are, but we can retain that part of ourself.
Paul Knipe
And also adapt to the circumstances. And a brand needs to be similar visually. It needs to have a visual system that can be fluid and dynamic. As Brett mentioned with the plasma source example, your logo can appear in different colors in different contexts. Google and the example there, it is responsive and can adapt to holidays, topics, current events and that has allowed Google to be that living brand that people have come to to realize whether it's celebrating someone's anniversary or a particular cultural event.
Paul Knipe
And when we talk about a living brand and we'll get more into this in a moment, it is very important to have a solid foundation. That foundation visually and in terms of your messaging, will often come through your brand guidelines and your style guides. Having this as an anchor, having this as a place that you can pull from and refer back to is very important with a living brand system, because it's it's not the case that a living brand is simply arbitrary.
Paul Knipe
It's rooted in something very well defined. And because it's well defined, you know, the boundaries where you can flex and you can adapt. I think the final piece on adapting appropriately is understanding that when you're looking at different channels, the living brand adapts to its audience and the visual language that's appropriate at the time and place. And when you think about the analogy of one of us and maybe our attire or our personal sense of style, we don't change ourselves personally.
Paul Knipe
If we put on a suit to go to a wedding or if we're running in a5k or if we're at the beach. But we do change our attire. And it would be awkward if we were always wearing the same clothes in every circumstance. So our essence remains the same. We adapt to different environments and when it comes to our visual identity and our messaging, being able to flex, being able to tailor how we do what we do for those circumstances and the needs in the moment is ultimately a huge part of that adaptation.
Paul Knipe
It's still the same brand. It's just dressed for the channel and audience at hand. So when we think about content marketing, whether it's blog posts, whether it's a webinar like this, there's sometimes a difference between the voice and the tone. Our brand message will use a consistent voice, which is true to us in our personality. But the tone and the creative expression may be somewhat different again, depending on that audience or the channel.
Paul Knipe
And then finally, I think authenticity is incredibly important for a living brand because trustworthiness and credibility are ultimately at the heart of how one can see trust and follow a brand as it adapts to different circumstances. So authenticity is a word that has become very common. And, you know, if we think about consumer products, I don't know that people are looking for an authentic brand when they're looking for a can of soup in a grocery store.
Paul Knipe
But it is very important that the brand stay true to its own values, its own system, and that that foundation is clear in every way that the brand expresses itself. So how do you demonstrate authenticity? It's essentially through some degree of continuity of that personality, knowing that your voice or your visual language can adapt and vary, but that that personality and values stay the same.
Paul Knipe
So this notion of show don't tell is very important. Let's let's show people what our values are, our mission, vision and set of values. And I think that sense of demonstrating authenticity and purpose and transparent is a way for people to see that and trust it across different touchpoints. I think the notion of purpose, it may vary slightly according to audience segments, and many of you with your own health care brands may have multiple audiences, so you can maintain a sense of authenticity and values even as you adapt your messaging for different audience segments and what's important to them.
Paul Knipe
Ultimately, if you don't know what your foundation is, what your core identity is, what your values are, that's where we can help. And that's where I think a basic framework and brand development process can help bring those things to life. So we've talked a fair amount about the ingredients. I want to go a little bit deeper and talk a little bit about our process and how we approach this because branding is a word that is used and we've talked about a living brand, but how do you create it?
Paul Knipe
What's that process look like? Without going too far into the weeds, it's worth recognizing the scenarios where branding is necessary because it's never just one thing. Consistently. It will really vary by organization, but healthcare success. We're very flexible and responsive to a specific customized branding needs. You have. We're not a doctrinaire agency that says you have to start here and you have to end here and you have to do everything in between.
Paul Knipe
We really like to be able to dial our approach up or down and customize it according to your needs. So sometimes it's just important to start with that foundation. Who are we? How are we different? How are we unique and how do we do this thing unlike anyone else? That's the basis of your positioning and your strategy, and some organizations simply need that.
Paul Knipe
They kind of know, but it's not something that's clear to your audiences. In other scenarios, you may really have a great sense of strategy or foundation, but the messaging is off, it's stale, it's dated, and it just isn't well differentiated from competitors. Sometimes you just need to renew your visual, your visual identity and your visual system to be more current, to be more vibrant and exciting, or to reflect your core values.
Paul Knipe
Sometimes it's a matter of, again, possibly being dated for multi-location practices or large organizations that may have multiple entities in their their organization. Understanding your brand architecture. The brand hierarchy can be very important, and sometimes that's a matter of determining are we a branded house? In other words, everyone is sort of following the same brand, a house of brands where multiple independent brands can live simultaneously side by side.
Paul Knipe
Sometimes there's an endorsement strategy where a well-known brand with a lot of equity and recognition can serve as an endorser for other brands in its family. You see this a lot in hospitality among hotel chains. Sometimes a brand simply needs to evolve slightly to meet a shifting competitive landscape. It was maybe three or four main players at one point.
Paul Knipe
It's now a much more crowded group and it's just necessary to adapt. So branding can take many shapes and forms. From our standpoint, the first steps in customizing this brand development process come down to a basic set of steps. Yes, we do believe that there are some essential ingredients, and the list on the left is really, I think, kind of important and maybe a very quick question that is answered very quickly.
Paul Knipe
But to meet your needs, we really want to focus on the most essential things. So if you need strategy, you need visual identity of messaging. But maybe some other parts you have pretty well understood will be there and will adopt a process that can help you with only those things in mind. Recognizing the need to at least talk about the opportunity for the other things, but to not linger on them, to dive into these steps very quickly.
Paul Knipe
Discovery. This is often the first step very quick, where we learn what we don't know. We may get to know you in the first few conversations, but this is the process where we get your data, your market research, your internal documentation and really understand you. We would also hope to have some learnings, some research, whether it's a series of surveys or polls, to gather some quantitative data on brand perception or other things.
Paul Knipe
Not always necessary, but it can be useful qualitative steps like simple stakeholder interviews or potentially focus groups, which can take a lot of different forms, are also great ways to hear from audiences that discovery is just important to set the stage. We always like to synthesize this and finally, doing an initial review of the competitive landscape is really important.
Paul Knipe
Understanding who are the players? Where do we stand in that mix? Who is emerging, who's on top, who has market share, who has what equity? This is really important to know what lane we could potentially play in. So strategy, strategy can take a lot of forms. Big companies like Apple, Coca-Cola, publicly traded companies will need to go through a very rigorous brand framework and brand foundation process so that they can really properly differentiate themselves from very competitive markets.
Paul Knipe
It's important to have that strategy to guide everything they do, every part of their marketing channels, and often to share with a team of agencies that are part of a large marketing planning group so that everyone is rowing in the same direction, so to speak. But a brand strategy process really defines the purpose mission, vision, values, the audiences, the brand's capabilities and the dynamics that are in play currently in the category.
Paul Knipe
And then how can you create a lane that builds audience and customer loyalty strategy? This is an exhaustive list, but healthcare success has a series of questions that we would really seek to answer with you in that initial strategy piece. Strategy doesn't need to be an extensive, immersive, long, expensive process. There's so many ways to get answers to this information.
Paul Knipe
It can sometimes be a series of quick interviews. It could be a workshop. What's most important is that we get the answers, whether it's a scrappy and resourceful approach or one that's collaborative and brings in a lot of your stakeholders. These three buckets essentially are the areas that help us understand the opportunity for the brand when we do this, when we have good answers to each of these areas, we can then start to define our own stake in the ground, our own unique lane.
Paul Knipe
And that really allows us to move into key questions that help a living brand come to life. Brett mentioned the plasma source example. They're a client of ours and they have really innovated the plasma donation space. While many organizations may try to appeal to younger audiences or different audience groups, but plasma source has done is recognized. We want to create a different experience that doesn't feel clinical or medical, but has a little bit more of a wellness vibe that is friendlier or more emotional and that can help people relax and potentially become recurring donors.
Paul Knipe
That's an innovation. It's a real invention in the category that has never happened. So with the brand and visual system and any brand step, it's useful to think about where can you pioneer? Where can you possibly even disrupt? And you don't always necessarily need to, but sometimes if there's an opportunity to take advantage of that, you can really create things that have never been done in your category.
Paul Knipe
Brand structure, as I mentioned, is really a matter of organizing. This is usually focused on, again, multiple entities within an organization. And very important to understand that because if it's not clear your consumers, your audiences will not have a clarity on how you're structuring your organization and how each individual brand fits together. Alex is going to talk briefly about visual identity and that part of the branding process, because that's a really core element of all of the case studies that Brett shared.
Alex Ignacio
Thank you. So I'm going to jump in right quick. Some important things to talk about when we create a strategic visual expression of your brand is from logos, fonts to color, palette and visual systems. We want to make sure all these elements look cohesively stunning and also adapt to any medium. So either digital print or environmental. We create design systems that have the flex to exist in any space necessary while tying in the brand's personality and its core visual foundation, which is why it's very important that we have that exploration phase early on to determine that that core.
Paul Knipe
Going hand-in-hand with your visual identity and your visual system are your core messages and messaging is a big part of our branding work because how you talk about what you do to your audiences is often how they will think of you. There's an emotional connection to the visual expression, but the language you use and how it reflects your core values and your personality is essential.
Paul Knipe
We typically define messaging as four main areas your messaging pillars, your core messages, tagline and elevator speech to define messaging pillars. That's basically not really an audience focused set of actual statements, but a list of focus areas or categories that you need to talk about within your organization. For example, if we're working with a mental health organization and they provide services for different disorders or treatments, their focus areas, their messaging pillars may fall into categories like post-traumatic stress disorder or depression or bipolar disorder.
Paul Knipe
Those would be the big categories and areas of expertise that that organization has. And then the second area core messages would be the audience focused messages that we would create that would speak to each of those messaging pillars. The core messages are important because once you have that toolkit of handful of messages that speak to your your work, you can deploy them across every channel from print, digital advertising to headlines on your website to actual language that may appear in your digital ads, as well as content for your social posts.
Paul Knipe
Having a consistent, unified body of language is an essential starting point framework in order to build a living brand, because once you have that, you're then able to shapeshift while your personality stays the same. But your language can shift according to channel tagline. Pretty straightforward, consistent statement that underlines your your core brand and usually lives very prominently with your identity.
Paul Knipe
Elevator speech. Pretty familiar to most of you. It's sort of the verbal way of capturing and distilling the essence of what the brand is about, what the organization does in a few brief statements. Ultimately, your messaging has to capture your purpose, mission, vision, values, and your brand strategy in carefully crafted language. So after all this, when is the right moment to consider a living brand approach?
Paul Knipe
We don't think that it's necessarily something you have to earn over time, as long as you have a clear foundation at the start. When we talk about the approach, you just have to have a strong sense of identity, personality values at that foundation as you move into the wording choices and the visuals that you have. It's not a way to fix it.
Paul Knipe
It's not a way to approach a broken brand system. It's instead a way to extend and allow your current brand to flourish in ways that are more responsive to your audiences. You have to think about your audience. You have to think about your competitors and the living brand. Ultimately is something that will allow you, if you understand who you are and in what context you need to play, you'll be able to shapeshift for that.
Paul Knipe
It just needs to be well-defined so that you can use that voice much the same way that a very confident, self-assured person with a good sense of their own personal identity knows how to adapt that core essence of themself to different circumstances. Bret, is there anything else you would want to add to this slide?
Brett Maurer
There is not. I think, you know, I think I would just reinforce that if your brand system or your core brand is not in good shape, this the living brand shouldn't be considered until it is. I believe your brand only complements your brand, but it doesn't change your brand. So if you're already struggling with it, if it's not really conveying who you are or speaking to who you want it to speak to.
Brett Maurer
There's a lot to be said for revisiting that discovery phase. Call talked about reevaluating those messages you want to convey to your consumers or your patients, and then looking at your brand and making sure that it's in good shape. Again, back to that reference to the tree, the trunk of the tree is your core brand. Those branches that come off the tree, allowing you to get into those new spaces and reach those new people can't stand on their.
Brett Maurer
Oh. So that is definitely the main takeaway for me. You just need to make sure your brand is solid so that you can flex with it, maybe have a bit more fun with it at all times, respecting where it came from and what a spirited.
Paul Knipe
So I want to go through a few additional points just to define some aspects of what I've gone through and a little more detail. I mentioned upfront research in the discovery phase. There are lots of ways to do this. It doesn't have to be lengthy, it doesn't have to be expensive. But getting some quantitative insights can be very useful as a starting point.
Paul Knipe
A simple survey among a sampling of relevant audience members or people who would meet the audience profile can be very, very useful in determining is our perception of our brand or who we want to be, who we believe we are actually the case. And if you're building a brand from scratch that doesn't exist. This is a way to also look at competitors and perceptions of them.
Paul Knipe
You can do this or surveys. You can do this through polls, often with tools that are very inexpensive and low cost, but the insights can be very powerful and drive in your head. Just a few sample questions here that could be part of that evaluation under Quantitative Insights. Qualitative to me has two parts. They're sort of the external, and this is where you may want to just hear from people.
Paul Knipe
You may want to let people talk and really let their values, their priorities come through in ways that are very important as you build your own brand insights to drive the strategy external, that really means going to the audiences themselves. And rather than just having them do a survey or a poll, you may have interviews with them to understand their usage, their needs and how they perceive the brands that are available to them.
Paul Knipe
Audience insights are incredibly important. And again, some questions here that would just be the kinds of things you might want to ask audiences. But the other half of developing good qualitative insights is internal. You have to also gain some understanding from within your organization, around any institutional knowledge, any historical insights related to the brand perceptions and audiences, because there's often a real wealth of information within your organization.
Paul Knipe
You have to be careful. You don't want your internal biases and perceptions of the brand to blind you from the first category of seeking input from your audiences. But it can also be important because you want the brand to reflect internally. You want to live your brand, if you will, and you never want to find your organization in a situation where you're espousing or communicating things about who you are externally.
Paul Knipe
But it's a different story internally and the brand values the brand, character and personality is not necessarily reflected internally. So the internal qualitative insights through again, interviews or focus groups can be a great way to learn opportunities, but also understand how your your brand can carry through internally written. Alex are going to speak a little bit to another big part of this process, which is what you should consider internally as you approach branding from a visual standpoint.
Alex Ignacio
Yes. So I will be talking about this very briefly. This can also be known as things to think of when contacting an agency. Hopefully us for building your living brand, you want to ask how will you use your visual brand and adapt it to be a living brand, Right? You want to ask, how will you maintain that brand integrity across marketing channels and platforms and think like what keeps your core branding and messaging tact?
Alex Ignacio
You have to ask, what are your needs that are being met? And very importantly, you want to give yourself the intention to be flexible, to reach those goals. And so if we go to the next slide, we want to again emphasize, like any living brand, implementation should further reinforce your core brand. It should make it stronger. So build the intention to consider what strengthens these brand systems that you're going to have in place.
Alex Ignacio
And after marketing, monitoring the marketing and evaluating the metrics, have you noticed any positive or negative change to certain components like patients and consumers engage more? And if so, should we be pushing those components? If not, should we be pulling them back? And finally, recognize your brand's visual system can't extend indefinitely to the point of becoming a sprawling, uncontrollable beast.
Alex Ignacio
Like, again, with the analogy of the tree, you want to make sure you're pruning its branches, making sure that it is going to the spaces that you want to. But in a beautiful and strategic way, evolve with purpose, and then we improve along the way.
Paul Knipe
So finally, couple of points. Moving a branding initiative through your organization does require some planning and some careful thought around things that can make it much easier than if you you don't anticipate certain things. Obviously, building team consensus on priorities is vital. Sometimes there is strong push from a quarter of your organization to think about branding. While there may be resistance for a variety of reasons from other areas.
Paul Knipe
It is important to have a unified team approach because once you get into it, you don't want to find those misalignments in the process, which can become very messy very quickly in that process. It's just very important to establish some decision making and review approach that's again, consensus driven and very clear because this is hard. And when you think about creative, it's so subjective.
Paul Knipe
It really can be important for everyone to be heard. But for there to be a core decision maker or core decision makers who essentially have a good sense of strategy and collaboration with the rest of the team in a lot of categories. There can be an instability. There may be new challengers, there may be public policy or regulation that affects things or could affect things now or in the future.
Paul Knipe
You don't want to invest in a lengthy branding process and only learn that a lot of what you've done is is obsolete or no longer relevant due to market changes or category changes. So having a healthy sense of that in advance and thinking forward really vital. We've mentioned this a few times, but a living brand is just that.
Paul Knipe
It needs feedback, it needs evaluation. Just like any of us pause to reflect, to say, How are my choices? How am I approaching these things? We should give our brands the same opportunity to get input. And so doing recurring testing and evaluation, repeating some of those discovery steps that I mentioned with qualitative or quantitative research can be a good way to know how you're doing.
Paul Knipe
How often you do that will largely dependent on your category, but it's just a great idea. Finally, avoid shortcuts. Sometimes it's tempting to think, yeah, we're you know, we have someone whose cousin is a graphic designer and they can pull together a visual identity and system. Sometimes that works. In fact, a lot of talented people out there who aren't officially graphic designers.
Paul Knipe
But we would really recommend a professional approach that captures all of the ingredients or the relevant ingredients with a professional eye that I walk through earlier. Because strategy and positioning and creative, visual and messaging all go together and are necessary to be a coherent foundation for a living brand to come together. So just to wrap up, you know, as digital has speed things up, people are able to find things more easily online.
Paul Knipe
They're able to use products and services with a speed and efficiency that they've never had. But some health care brands still struggle to evolve and adapt to all of the marketing options that are there, which are in turn evolving constantly. So, so much of what we do these days is digital. First, we see it on our mobile phones, we see it elsewhere.
Paul Knipe
Social channels cross different things we do from banking to shopping. Living brands are the way to adapt your brand to all of those channels, regardless of, you know, the specific sector that you're in. Just to wrap up, our team would love to to be on your radar as a partner. We're extremely strategic collaborative. We build and would be happy to provide.
Paul Knipe
We would be happy to provide a brand checkup for any of you. If you want to reach out as a means of starting a conversation with us about how we do what we do. But thank you for this webinar today. It really felt good to share this with you and hopefully we can begin to build some friendships and relationships that some of you, If there is a list of questions, we've allocated some time here at the end to review and if folks have them and maybe we can open up the chat.
Paul Knipe
If anyone wants to throw any questions our way, I can read your notes and then put the question out and provide an answer. So if there are any questions tonight, please just pop them into the Zoom meeting chat.
Alex Ignacio
Yeah. So it looks like there aren't any in the chat so far. So if we have up there, we have a meal. Chicken alert. Okay, go ahead.
Paul Knipe
So one question we have is what if someone needs a complete rebrand? Well, a complete rebrand would essentially be a version of the top to bottom list of steps that we went through. But I want to emphasize that just as a living brand needs to adapt and be flexible, we are ready to be flexible and adapt to your specific needs.
Paul Knipe
A complete rebrand would mean we define the strategy. We define your positioning. We define your purpose, mission, vision, values. And we set that framework determining if there's an opportunity to innovate in your category. But then we work to define your messaging, your visual system, and ultimately to document everything in a guidelines that captures the essence and core of your brand from top to bottom.
Paul Knipe
That's what a complete rebrand would look like. We have another question you will have access to to this webinar after After today. Thank you for that question and the brand checkup that we mentioned here at the end. I, I think the way that we would approach that is maybe if you are interested in a checkup, you provide us with a simple, a simple paragraph, maybe 2 to 3 sentences that capture a description of your organization, the challenges you perceive with your brand or questions, and maybe a note or two about your core audiences and maybe there's a final piece.
Paul Knipe
If there's an additional sentence in that paragraph where you would like to be as a brand and how that's different from where are currently, in other words, where you would like to get to with an evolution or an adaptation with your brand, that checkup would start with that framework from you, and we would come back with some simple thoughts related to where you would start, how we would customize the branding process.
Paul Knipe
And perhaps a couple of questions to dig a little bit deeper. That's what the checkup would generally look like. Let's see here another quick question. How do we change our work or adapt our approach based on small or large companies? Again, I think that being ready to customize is is very important to us. Small companies sometimes are tighter on resources and may not need as much in terms of process.
Paul Knipe
Their branding needs may be more specific, even if you're just redoing your visual identity, your logo and the ways that that comes together, it's important to have a strategic discussion about audiences and competitors. So sometimes we condense the process and make it much more simple, streamlined for smaller clients. Bigger clients are different because the scale and implications of their brand are often higher stakes.
Paul Knipe
They may have shareholders, they may have a board, they may have competitors that are national or global, or it just may be very competitive and the more competitive and higher stakes, the more important it is to have a properly differentiated framework and strategy testing becomes much more important. I would say that the living brand components probably require some user and audience testing as well.
Paul Knipe
When we get to a place where we have a system, we would want to validate with audiences there to. So any other questions here? Some very specific questions if you want to. If you have specific questions about your organization, feel free to reach out to us directly. I can provide my email and our team at healthcare success can follow up specifically on the opportunities for you, but we'd love to begin the conversation.
Paul Knipe
Anything else?
Alex Ignacio
I do have some questions internally from our team that we would like to ask. So this one specifically is for Brett. Can you better describe your process of creating a brand architecture that accommodates potential future brand extensions and subbrands?
Brett Maurer
Yeah, most most definitely a large part, especially when we're dealing with larger companies that do anticipate needing a more complex brand hierarchy. We work really closely with strategy and of course, your company to identify what those could be in the future. You know, are there is it a multi-location practice where you need multiple logos that fit under the same brand hard hierarchy?
Brett Maurer
Is that multiple multiple departments within one clinic, say, oncology, you know, brand oncology. So we're very used to doing that. We do it quite a bit, especially when we fit some companies that maybe aren't using their architecture appropriately, but largely that is one of those items that would happen that would be talked about early on in our process when when we start to identify what you expect to need, whether you need it now or you anticipate needing it, that really does change how we approach the design of your mark.
Brett Maurer
We design it to accommodate multiple subbrands or multiple locations, but it's really important to know early on. Admittedly, we do get a lot of smaller companies who have grown maybe considerably quicker than they anticipated to, or they join forces or acquire other companies, which we then need to reevaluate what we've done for them and make additional recommendations. But we we do it quite a bit.
Brett Maurer
A lot of times it's largely just through understanding what type of branding we want. You know, Paul mentioned brand houses or house of brands. Are you going to have standalone logos for each company? Will you have a more structured hierarchy with a core umbrella brand, always designating another level of your hierarchy, But it's largely done in exploration and then largely done through iterative design and in strategy with our teams to make sure that we can accommodate any level of subbrands or alternate brands that are required.
Brett Maurer
But it's pretty common practice practice for us here. We do a lot with multi-location clinics and and clients. So pretty, pretty standard if that helps for us. Do you want to add in on that?
Paul Knipe
I think that that's that's pretty good. We do have a question and a hand raised from one of our guests. Emil, do you want to go ahead? Maybe we aren't getting the audio there. Emil, if you want to send through any question, you have directly to me. My email address is p nitpicky and IPD at Healthcare Success dot com and I can kind of put that in the chat here.
Paul Knipe
Any other questions for our session today? We have a couple more minutes and could review a few more.
Alex Ignacio
Yeah. I have a question for Paul. This is again a question from our internal team. So how do you measure the success of brand building efforts? What are the key performance indicators, KPIs that we use to track the progress of your healthcare success.
Paul Knipe
The key performance indicators and KPIs can take different forms and they can often be at a basic qualitative level, but also an evaluation of the channels themselves. When you think about your brand strategy and it's expression through your creative and your messaging, you have to be able to look at performance. So for example, if you're using a specific message in organic social, what does the engagement look like?
Paul Knipe
If you're using some of your core positioning in your paid search or paid social ads? What ads are performing best? It's very important to do split testing, a, B, testing around messaging. When you get to the point where you have an execution or a plan for your your actual marketing. So when you tie brand strategy into actual choices creatively with messaging, it's often very channel specific and you can evaluate the performance of your branding with your audiences based on a strategy for identifying KPI.
Paul Knipe
So when you look at messaging, for example, what particular phrases are converting? If you're running a Facebook or Instagram campaign, what is converting, what is leading to a conversion and action? There's a direct line also between how you approach brand strategy and things like SEO, search engine optimization. If you look at organic conversions, in other words, the people who find your website through Google and simply search and then go through to your site and take action based on what they find, it's important that we recognize how you position the language, the structure of your website, and the content on that page should be a reflection of your messaging, your values, your personality, and a high
Paul Knipe
search volume for the terms that are on those pages. So when you think about how all of those ingredients ladder up to your core strategy, that's essentially an ingredient. If you're finding the pages on your site are not getting any real attention or organic conversions, that's a key metric that may indicate that that your assumptions about your brand may not work.
Paul Knipe
Other things would then print advertising, whether it's impressions can be key KPIs. We would work with anyone that we work with on a branding and then marketing plan to define ways to evaluate the performance of the brand expression over time.
Brett Maurer
And just to add on to that, I think it's a great question because largely that is where this this drive to adopt this idea of a within brand has come from. Right? You know, a lot of times we've done campaigns for clients, social ads for clients. And, you know, if the conversions weren't quite there, if we didn't get to where we want to be, we were very willing to flex that after looking at it and really find where those those leads are, those impressions are to be found.
Brett Maurer
So a large part of kind of what we've talked about here today is based in our willingness to do AB testing, to see what conversions are, to see what's working and not as shifting things on the fly. And it started I would definitely say it's more related to social campaigns, social ads, because those are easy to shift. But we've taken it further here with the idea of build within brand because it's all about making sure you're targeted exactly where you want to be and speaking to you want to be.
Brett Maurer
And if and if we're missing it, we make adjustments.
Paul Knipe
Any other final questions? Maybe time for one more. Okay. Thank you. Again, we really are so grateful for your attendance today. We're passionate about brand development strategy and how it then percolates through all of the marketing that we do for our clients. And we'd love to work with you. So any questions or any inquiries related to a brand check up from Brett, Alex and I.
Paul Knipe
Please contact me directly. Again, I've added my email address to the chat and we hope to talk with you soon.
Brett Maurer
Thank you.
