Oh, bloggity blog, how I’ve missed you. Did you miss me? It seems like yesterday that I posted my last blog (May 24th). But there is good reasons why I’ve been away. Here’s what we’ve been up to:
– Completed a video shoot for a corporate video. We had 2 days of shooting on the ground in various locations with talent and a morning up in a helicopter taking video and still shots.
– Designed our booth for the AMA Nonprofit Marketing Conference. Check out a picture here.
– Helped launch the new brand of one of our clients, detailed below.
– Created and launched a testimonial campaign for a client with photo shoots for each of our referring families.
– Launched the mid-year ad campaign for one of our clients. Check out one of those TV spots.
– Launched a summer PSA and accompanying media blitz. In just 2 months it’s received more than $1.5 million in media value. Check out one of those TV spots.
– Completed our social media outreach for Kids to Parks Day. Results here.
– Wrote and designed responses to 5 new business proposals. That means the rest of the summer is for pitching!
So, now for the details of our national rebrand a-year-in-the-making. We started working with ASHP (American Society of Health-System Pharmacists) in April 2013 to provide an analysis of their current branding efforts” which included an assessment of:
- The effectiveness of their tagline
- Language that the organization uses to describe itself
- Visual identity
- How ASHP presents itself and interacts with its members and stakeholders at all levels, including our national meetings, websites, publications and other relevant instances.
The final deliverable was a full communications audit ranging from imagery to publications to the website and a recommended tagline for ASHP to use moving forward.
Along the way, we were also asked by ASHP whether they thought it would benefit the brand if they shifted to using just their acronym ASHP as their name. It would help their audiences (mainly their membership) avoid confusion over the true definition of a “health-system pharmacist.” (Which was the main theme of the audit.) And besides, they were already known as “ASHP” so it wouldn’t be that dramatic of a change. We ultimately green-lighted this idea and also recommended an overhaul of the brand, including the logo.
Several months after the audit was complete, we began the process of rebranding ASHP, starting with the logo and tagline. Later, we would move onto messaging, implementation and sub-branding, but I’m going to focus on the main visual elements here.
Their current logo had been used since 1985 with the tagline, “Together We Make A Great Team.” It was a clever double entendre–reflecting that pharmacists are part of a larger healthcare team as well as the importance of being part of the ASHP team. But, it wasn’t ownable. The tagline could’ve been used to a sporting goods store or whitewater rafting adventure group.
We started with concepts that had different design themes – graphic typography, graphic symbol, triad-structure and a few others. The team unanimously decided to pursue the graphic symbol concept. They were eager to create a symbol that represented the forward movement the Association represented for the practice of pharmacy. We created several logos choices that embodied this idea, including changing the “A” in ASHP to a lowercase character to make the acronym read more as a word and less as a set of initials. And we incorporated the tagline (which also had it’s own creative journey!) “Pharmacists Advancing Healthcare.”
Here’s the final logo. I think it took us some 50 iterations, but we got there.
And now we get to proudly show our “baby” to the world. It was unveiled at ASHP’s Summer Meetings to rave reviews. Check out the announcement video ASHP created.
