Why Creativity Belongs in Healthcare Marketing

When you think of healthcare marketing, “creativity” may not be the first word that comes to mind. In a strict regulatory environment that leads to long-winded disclaimers and paragraphs of fine print, the guardrails on creativity can feel especially narrow. But constraints like these are exactly why truly creative work stands out, and why a little extra effort can go a long way.

It starts with brand

We’re big believers in the importance of brand. In healthcare, brand is one area where you have more freedom in your marketing than in, say, promoting a new medication or treatment. The award-winning “Thrive” campaign from Kaiser Permanente is a perfect example of how brand marketing can do some heavy lifting.

The campaign focused on small, everyday habits that encouraged preventive wellness and community health. Even without being directly connected to a product or service, “Thrive” drove a 14% increase in member acquisition and was ranked #1 in brand recall for seven years, according to Zeely.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the campaign, however, is just how, well, ordinary it is. Ordinary people doing ordinary things — and thriving. It connected to the average person on an emotional level that made preventive health feel important and accessible.

The benefits of a strong brand campaign extend into more focused advertising. A recognizable campaign anthem, such as “Thrive,” can immediately connect an ad for a product or service back to the positive brand recognition a customer already holds.

Here’s how we developed creative brands for three very different healthcare clients.

Weaving local spirit into on-demand care

In our work for GoHealth, a chain of on-demand care clinics from Legacy Health, we developed bright, quirky creative that resonated with the local Portland audience. It was fun, a bit silly, and unlike anything else in health clinic advertising.

GoHealth offers an alternative to waiting, worrying, and wondering if your symptoms are worth all the trouble of a traditional doctor visit. So we built our campaign around the tagline “Just Go,” connecting Portlanders’ love of getting out and doing things with the importance of seeking healthcare when you need it.

To reach people everywhere, the campaign ran in print, transit, digital media, and billboards. “Just Go” elevated GoHealth by showing it understood its Pacific Northwest audience better than anyone else.

A new identity for vet health veterans

When Wellhaven Pet Health tasked us with developing their brand voice and image, we knew we had to throw the existing script out the window. Veterinary marketing was an old dog in desperate need of new tricks.

We grounded our approach in one core belief: happy vets make for happy pets. Then we set to work crafting a brand that illustrated (no pun intended) this happiness at every touchpoint, for both veterinarians and pet parents. Instead of photos of sterile, white-walled exam rooms, we developed a colorful collection of illustrations and animations that popped off the page or screen and drew people in with a sense of warmth and comfort.

No pet parent wants to endure the reality of a sick or injured pet, but if you can make the veterinary experience feel gentler and more inviting, they may just choose your clinic over another.

A refreshing approach to dermatology

Dermatology telehealth brand Zest came to us with a name — and nothing else. From a logo to a website, we crafted every component of its brand from the ground up.

Zest sought to disrupt the dermatology game by making expert psoriasis and eczema care more accessible and more immediate. It understood how this patient community had been underserved by traditional clinics and direct-to-consumer brands. So when we got to work, we knew we wanted to center our creative on the concept of support.

The logo itself is a nod to that, with the lower stroke of the Z extending to prop up the e. More obviously, we wove the idea of support into a series of illustrations that brought telehealth to life in front of customers’ eyes, a visual metaphor for how virtual care can still provide real results.

Creativity thrives in constraint

If the first thing you think of when you hear “creativity” is an artist or musician, allow us to challenge that bias. Creativity, more broadly, is problem solving. Healthcare marketing presents unique challenges due to its highly-regulated operating environment, but those same challenges are what force you to develop creative solutions.

We love a good challenge.

If you’re looking for a way to differentiate and market your healthcare brand, give us a shout. We’d be happy to listen to your story and see how we can help bring it to life.