Hello Health came to us with their great idea: Use the internet and communication technologies to restore heathcare and wellness back to the foundation: the doctor-patient relationship. The dream project, right? Selling a great idea that fulfills an almost universal need, one that when you tell people about it, they instantly ask where to sign up.

What they lacked was the way to spread the word. What was the face of the brand – what was the experience? The attitude? The presence? They didn’t have a whole lot of time before the first clinic opens (there’s always a catch, right?) so we set out not only to create a great site for them to get the message out, but an entire identiy that they could rely on for years to come.

Deliverables:
Brand Identity
Brand Guidelines
Information Site
Subway Advertisements

Healthcare sucks. Hello Health came to us with a great business model: Bring healthcare back to the days before the HMO, by providing personal levels of service with your doctor through technology. But besides the idea and the infrastructure, they had no identity, no web presence, and no visibility. So, in a very short amount of time, we needed to create a brand and launch a site to complement the opening of their very first office.

The Brand: We wanted to create a brand image for Hello Health that was at once both friendly and authoritative, the qualities you’d look for in a physician. It also needed to be fresh and convey a sense of modern technology awareness without coming off as glib or trendy. After several rounds of exploration, we landed on the H Shield, combining Health to the power of conversation (because, at its essence, the brand is about communicating with your doctor, and technology merely is the conduit to that goal). We also chose the voice bubble because it conveyed IM and other online forms of communication. The logo, wordmark, and colors are strong enough to stand alone, and harmonious enough to exist in various combinations, whether it’s online, on a sign, or on a vespa.

The Site: Once we had settled on our identity, we set out to create a site to inform those curious about Hello Health about how it works and why they should consider signing up. This site is similar to a brand like Netflix™ or Zipcar™ in that way, in that the goal is to educate the new consumer on how the system works, what its benefits are and direct them to join. Very early on, we decided that the site should also be a showcase of our members. The Hello Health brand, at it’s essence, is about the community it serves, and since its nodes are all local to their neighborhoods, we decided that the backdrop of the homepage should be photos of actual members. The rest of the site fell into place once we made that decision. We decided to use a lightweight, slim HTML back-end in lieu of any flashery, since we wanted to focus on delivering the information in a clear and concise way, with minimal barriers to entry (especially on mobile browsers).

The Advertising: Hello Health, being such a new brand, didn’t need a ton of above the board advertising at launch. We believe in the market, and the Internet, and both would be far more reliable vehicles for getting the word out about the brand than a massive campaign. Also, we want to inspire trust in our new members, and they happen to a be a lot that are exceedingly wary of advertisements. So we decided to foster the brand’s development through blog posts and other non-traditional means. One of those was a subway ad that ran, briefly, in the local Williamsburg stations. This was our first attempt at creating a subway ad, and we definitely applied what we know about interactive advertising to the problem. You can read about the whole experiment here, and why we think that it was a success.

On the day of launch, Hello Health received a tremendous amount of web coverage on area blogs. The brand became an instant neighborhood fixture, owing as much to the brand identity being present at the clinic as to the blog coverage. Part of the interest stemmed from the controversy from our subway ads, which certainly got people talking, but they still remained an introduction point to Hello Health as a whole. The brand continues to grow, taking on more members daily, and Hello Health is already eyeing new locales.